John Venn

John Venn, aged around forty, mid-1870s. Reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

John Venn

A Life in Logic

Lukas M. Verburgt

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2022 by The University of Chicago

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Published 2022

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81551-0 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81552-7 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226815527.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Verburgt, Lukas M., author.

Title: John Venn : a life in logic / Lukas M. Verburgt.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021023932 | ISBN 9780226815510 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226815527 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Venn, John, 1834–1923. | Logicians—England—Biography. | Philosophers—England—Biography. | University of Cambridge—Faculty—Biography. | LCGFT: Biographies.

Classification: LCC B1669.V464 V47 2022 | DDC 192 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021023932

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Abbreviations

Family Tree

Chronology

Preface

1   Family, Childhood, and Youth (1834–53)

2   Student (1853–57)

3   Curate (1857–62)

4   Intellectual Breakthrough (1862)

5   Moral Scientist (1862–69)

6   Probability (1866)

7   Religious Thinker (1867–73)

8   Logic Papers (1874–80)

9   Algebraic Logic (1881)

10   Dereverend Believer and Amateur Scientist (1883–90)

11   Empirical Logic (1889)

12   Biographer (1891–1923)

Epilogue: A Worldless Victorian

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Frontispiece: John Venn, aged around forty, mid-1870s

4.1   Venn, aged twenty-two, among Caian friends

5.1   Testimonial from John Stuart Mill for Venn’s candidature for the Knightbridge Professorship of Moral Philosophy, University of Cambridge

6.1   Letter from John Maynard Keynes to Venn, 31 August 1921

7.1   Venn’s father, Henry Venn of CMS

7.2   Venn’s brother, Henry, and sister, Henrietta

9.1   Venn diagrams for two, three, four, and five terms and an example of the horseshoe method

9.2   Venn diagram for “No x is y”

9.3   Venn’s example of using numerals to mark compartments

9.4   Venn’s logical-diagram machine

9.5   Venn’s table of symbolical expressions of “No S is P”

10.1   Portrait of Venn, aged around fifty

10.2   Excerpt from Venn’s letter to the electors to the Wykeham Professorship of Logic, University of Oxford, 1889

10.3   Venn’s graph of a random walk

10.4   Venn’s example of an asymmetrical distribution

10.5   Table of contents of Venn’s course Theory of Statistics (1891)

11.1   Excerpt from Venn’s “Science and Common Thought” (1889)

12.1   Portrait of Venn, aged sixty-five

E.1   Letter from Leslie Stephen to Venn, 2 September 1902

Abbreviations

“Annals”

“Autobiographical sketch (1903),” University of Birmingham, Cadbury Research Library Special Collections, Church Missionary Society Archive, Venn MSS, Acc81, F27

CMS Venn

University of Birmingham, Cadbury Research Library Special Collections, Church Missionary Society Archive, Venn MSS, Acc81

CUC

Cambridge University Calendar

CUR

Cambridge University Reporter

GCA

Gonville and Caius College Archive, University of Cambridge

GUL Dicey

Glasgow University Library, Special Collections Department, A. V. Dicey Papers

JRULM JFP

John Rylands University Library of Manchester, Jevons Family Papers

SGL Venn

Society of Genealogists Library, Special Collections, Venn Collection

TCL

Trinity College Library, Cambridge

UCL FG

University College London Library, Special Collections, Francis Galton Archive

Family tree

Chronology

1834

Born 4 August, Drypool, Hull

1840

Attended Cholmondeley School, Highgate, London

1846–47

Attended Highgate School, London

1848–53

Attended Islington Proprietary School, London

1853

Matriculated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge

1857

Graduated BA (equal sixth wrangler), University of Cambridge

1858

Elected junior fellow, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge

Ordained deacon, Diocese of Ely

Curate of Cheshunt, Hertfordshire

1859

Ordained priest, Ely

1860–62

Curate of St. Leonard’s, Hastings and Mortlake, London

1862

Published first article, “Science of History,” in Fraser’s Magazine

Appointed catechist in moral sciences, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge

Became member of the Grote Club

1864

Dean of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge

Examiner, Moral Sciences Tripos, University of Cambridge

1866

Published The Logic of Chance

Put himself forward for Knightbridge Professorship of Moral Philosophy, University of Cambridge, following John Grote’s death

1867

Appointed lecturer in moral sciences, Gonville and Caius College

Married Susanna Carnegie Edmonstone

1868

Elected senior fellow, Gonville and Caius College

1869

Hulsean Lecturer, University of Cambridge

1871–76

External examiner, University of London

1872

Put himself forward for Knightbridge Professorship of Moral Philosophy, University of Cambridge, following F. D. Maurice’s death

1873

Death of father, Henry Venn of CMS

1876

Published second edition of The Logic of Chance

1877–91

Collaboration with James Ward in campaign for a “psycho-physical laboratory” at Cambridge

1880

Published first paper on “Venn diagrams”

1881

Published Symbolic Logic

1883

Resigned Holy Orders under Clerical Disabilities Act (1870)

Elected fellow of the Royal Society of London

Birth of son, John Archibald Venn

Acted as one of the electors who chose Henry Sidgwick to the Knightbridge Professorship of Moral Philosophy, University of Cambridge

1884

Admitted ScD, University of Cambridge

1887–90

Collaboration with Francis Galton on Cambridge anthropometry

1888

Donated collection of logic books to Cambridge University Library

Published third edition of The Logic of Chance

1889

Published The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic

Put himself forward for Wykeham Professorship of Logic, University of Oxford

1892

Elected fellow of the Society of Antiquaries

1894

Published second edition of Symbolic Logic

1897

Published first volume of Biographical History of Gonville and Caius College

Put himself forward for the Chair of Mental Philosophy and Logic, University of Cambridge

1903–23

President, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge

1907

Published second edition of The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic

1907–8

President, Cambridge Society of Antiquaries

1909

Invention of bowling machine with son, John Archibald Venn

1922

Published first volume of Alumni Cantabrigienses

1923

Died 4 April, Cambridge

Preface

John Venn (1834–1923) is known today mainly for the diagram that bears his name—a simple device famous enough to have inspired a worldwide “Google doodle” in 2014 as well as the 2017 makeover of the Drypool Bridge in Hull, his place of birth. Somewhat paradoxically, the postmortem fame of the Venn diagram has eclipsed Venn’s own status as a leading Cambridge figure and “one of the most accomplished of living logicians” among more famous contemporaries and colleagues such as Fitzjames and Leslie Stephen, Henry Sidgwick, Francis Galton, and Lewis Carroll.1 A fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and of the prestigious Royal Society whose writings and teaching influenced generations of Cambridge students, Venn was praised by John Stuart Mill as “a highly successful thinker” with much “power of original thought.”2 After his death, at the age of eighty-eight, he was honored with an obituary in the Times and with substantial entries in the Dictionary of National Biography and the Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Some of his books became classics in the history of British philosophy and modern logic, and his Alumni Cantabrigienses is still used today as a standard reference source. Notwithstanding Venn’s prominence and legacy as a Victorian academic who spent his entire career teaching at, reforming, and telling the history of the University of Cambridge, there has hitherto been no comprehensive study of his life and work. The aim of this book is to redress this remarkable slight of fate.

The central fact about Venn’s life is that he was born into a distinguished family molded by traditions—the clerical, the Evangelical, and the Cantabrigian—that casted him too. When he entered Cambridge, Venn represented the eighth generation of the Venn family to enter a university, the first three at Oxford, the last five at Cambridge. A few years later, upon taking Holy Orders, Venn came to represent the ninth continuous generation, from father to son, to become a clergyman of the Church of England and the fourth generation of Venns to identify with the church’s Evangelical wing, at whose very core they stood from the Wesleyan revival until the mid-Victorian era. After his great-grandfather the Reverend Henry Venn had converted to Evangelicalism and sketched the Evangelical schema of salvation in The Complete Duty of Man, his grandfather the Reverend John Venn ministered to the famous “Clapham Sect.” The years at Clapham provided the Venn family with a golden chain of connections that tied them, by birth, marriage, or friendship, to the other great names of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British culture: Darwin, Dicey, Forster, Macaulay, Stephen, Webb, Wilberforce . . .

Venn’s place in the world was very much made for him by his forebears. What initially remained for him was to live up to the family traditions and to make them his own—to become who he was born to be. Venn took Holy Orders, spent time as a curate, married a woman from a sound Evangelical background, preached before the university, and wrote for the Evangelical Christian Observer. During his curacies, as the storm produced by Essays and Reviews and On the Origin of Species swept its way through Britain, Venn started to explore a new selection of reading—centered around Mill’s System of Logic—and to establish a circle of friends of his own choosing. Born in the late Georgian era, like many Victorians of his generation Venn eventually moved away from the religion of his youth. Venn’s “crisis of faith” was not a sudden moment of “unconversion,” with biblical criticism and scientific discoveries shocking his religious conviction, but a decades-long “de-conversion” process in which an emotional attachment to Evangelicalism slowly dissolved under the influence of an intellectual engagement with liberal Anglican and scientific thought.3 Neither was his religious transition in any sense straightforward, though he himself went to great lengths to discover what might be termed its underlying emotional logic. Venn described his position in 1858, when he studied Mill for hours each day while preaching Evangelical sermons every Sunday, as an altogether “queer state of things”;4 in the late 1860s, he emerged onto the public Evangelical platform while he already privately defined himself as a liberal Broad Churchman; and he maintained a clerical position for over ten years after his father’s death while already feeling drawn toward the opinions that eventually made him resign Holy Orders in 1883. Venn always remained a devout believer and churchgoer. With old age also came nostalgia for Clapham and a sense of the social and ethical importance of everything it stood for in a modern nation torn apart by the First World War.

Venn broke with two of the family traditions, but his room for maneuver turned out to be limited, as he climaxed the third, academic line. After his not particularly happy curacies, Venn returned to residence at his college in 1862, where he was appointed catechist, a post that was later converted into a moral sciences lectureship. Together with his colleagues and fellow university reformers F. D. Maurice, Henry Sidgwick, James Ward, Alfred Marshall, and several others, Venn played an important role in the development of the Moral Sciences Tripos after its reconstruction in 1861 and in the movement for the higher education of women. At Cambridge, Venn also entered the informal circle of John Grote, William Whewell’s successor as the Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy. Grote’s discussion group (called the Grote Club and later the Grote Society) influenced Venn’s approach to the moral sciences—an eclectic mix of what would today be called the human and social sciences—as much as it seems to have fueled his ambition to seek preferment to support a permanent academic career. Through his lecturing, tutoring, and examining for the Moral Sciences Tripos as well as through his textbooks and articles on logic, Venn contributed much to the professionalization and specialization of philosophy and, thereby, to the local origins of the famous Cambridge school of analytic philosophy founded by G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell. Venn taught inductive logic, introduced the new subjects of probability theory and algebraic logic, and pioneered a timely mix of conventionalism, pragmatism, and analysis that influenced Moore’s and Russell’s moral sciences teachers J. Neville Keynes and W. E. Johnson as well as their own pupils C. D. Broad and Frank Ramsey. Although Venn maintained a college lectureship until 1897, upon his donation of his vast collection of logic books to Cambridge University Library in 1889, Venn turned away from logic and became active in other fields of study: anthropometry, statistics, and history. Venn lobbied with his colleague James Ward, the eminent psychologist, for the establishment at Cambridge of what would have been the world’s first psychological laboratory; he collaborated with Francis Galton on performing mental and physical anthropometric tests at the Cambridge Philosophical Society; he worked with his son, John Archibald Venn, on the monumental Alumni Cantabrigienses; and he compiled a dozen other biographical, antiquarian, and historical volumes. Around the turn of the century, Venn became the historian and president of his college and so consolidated the third family tradition, continued by his son, who would be president of Queens’ College, Cambridge, from 1932 until his death in 1958.

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The main goal of this book is to provide the big picture of Venn’s life and work: drawing on his personal papers, which include hundreds of letters as well as an unpublished autobiography,5 and on his published oeuvre, it covers the entire period from his birth as an Evangelical son to his death as a Cambridge don. The book offers both an overview and an in-depth analysis of his almost-forgotten life and work, providing a fresh entry point for examining broader historical themes in nineteenth-century academia and religion, ranging from the crisis of Victorian faith and the creation of new scholarly disciplines and values to the roots of Cambridge analytic philosophy and the use of historical study to establish a sense of belonging in a rapidly changing world.

Venn’s life will be explored in terms of his overlapping religious and academic identities, as formed within the context of the inherited and acquired communities of which he was part. His religious identity is traced with reference to his family’s clerical and Evangelical traditions and his Evangelical youth as well as his churchmanship, public positions, religious ideas, and resignation of Holy Orders. His academic identity is described as an interaction with ideas, colleagues, and collaborators, not only on an informal level, on walking tours, at the college table, and in debating clubs, but also mediated through the official channels of journals like Mind and Nature, learned societies such as the Royal Society, and the institutional structures of university and college. The picture that emerges of Venn, the person, is of a man with many, sometimes mutually reinforcing and at other times seemingly contradictory, affinities: a natural-born skeptic of the anima naturaliter Christiana; a public Evangelical and private Broad Churchman; a traditionalist reformer; a professional logician and amateur scientist; a self-chosen layman longing for a country parish; and a Georgian Englishman living through the Victorian and Edwardian eras as well as the First World War.

Throughout the book’s chronological narrative, Venn’s work is discussed as much as possible as an integral part of his gradually developing religious and academic identities: it was through logical reasoning that he sought to prove the benefits of living religiously, and it was in logic that he made a remarkable career for himself. For reasons to be explained further on, at times it will be necessary to discuss Venn’s work largely on its own terms, placing it in the intellectual context of the philosophical traditions and contemporary debates to which it contributed. Until the early twentieth century, Venn was widely known, both at home and abroad, as one of the most important logicians of his time. Around the turn of the century, some ten years after the publication of what was his final work on logic, he was offered an honorary degree at Princeton University in recognition of his significant and wide-ranging influence on the field. Venn’s fame as a logician rested on three major textbooks, a dozen articles, ten reviews, and some five discussion notes, covering probability theory (The Logic of Chance), deductive or algebraic logic (Symbolic Logic), and inductive or empirical logic (The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic). Venn is nowadays no longer actively studied. One obvious reason is that most of his contributions to logic have become redundant because of the great logical innovations of Frege, Peano, Russell, and the modern analytic philosophers that followed in their footsteps. Since several pioneers of this new tradition deliberately pushed earlier work into oblivion—whereas, in fact, there was also an important continuity between their thought and that of nineteenth-century figures like Venn—there is much more to it than that. If nothing else, there was the project of placing logic at the heart of philosophy, of using logical formalization to pass through the surface of vague, ordinary language. Another more profound reason for the fact that Venn has been largely forgotten is that his contributions have been obscured by motivations no longer obvious today and by contradictory influences, balanced between the old Aristotelian logic and new trends that were still in development but would soon be overthrown by the rise of mathematical logic. British logic had been revived in the 1820s by Richard Whately’s Elements of Logic, which between the 1830s and 1850s spurred the creation of two partly overlapping and partly opposing traditions: that of deductive logic—to which belonged formal logic, focused on extensions of syllogistic forms (Hamilton, Mansel), and algebraic logic, which broke free from syllogistic logic through the application of mathematics (De Morgan, Boole)—and inductive logic (Mill, Whewell, Herschel), which was chiefly concerned with the methods of empirical scientific investigation. Like other logicians starting their careers in the 1860s–70s, such as his archrival William Stanley Jevons, Venn was primarily engaged in weaving together these different strands of British philosophy, to which he himself added that of probability. The point of studying Venn’s logical project is twofold: first, to present it as a more or less coherent whole, standing at the apogee of the Boolean and Millian traditions to which it remained tied; second, to obtain a better understanding of a rather confusing period in British and Cambridge philosophy, in general, and modern logic, more specifically. Within philosophy, the empiricism of Mill was slowly but steadily losing ground, but the idealism that would briefly dominate the English-speaking world had not yet arrived on the scene. Within logic, the old syllogistic and formal logic was still taught, the shift from an inductive to a hypothetical-deductive scientific method underway, the algebraic reform of deductive reasoning not yet fully established, and the new, mathematical logic of Frege and Russell yet forthcoming. It is not too much to say that Venn’s generation of mid-Victorian philosophers, which offered an eclectic mix of philosophical viewpoints, supplies a key missing link in our grasp of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British philosophical thought and, as such, of the Anglo-American tradition to which also belonged C. S. Peirce and John Dewey.

John Venn: A Life in Logic provides, for the first time, a comprehensive treatment of the development, content, and legacy of Venn’s entire logical oeuvre. The unavoidably somewhat technical discussions of his contributions to logic are interwoven with and connected to various aspects of his religious and academic life as well as with the books produced during his second career, from 1890 on, as an amateur scientist, historian, and antiquarian. One example of the overlap between his life and logical work is Venn’s very first article, which provided the starting point for his future academic career and would resonate through his entire oeuvre, up to the 1890s. Written in 1862 while he was still a young curate, the article added to the contemporary debate on the abstract possibility of a social science a penetrating consideration directly inspired by Christian concerns over free will. A few years later, Venn, then already an active member of an increasingly secular Cambridge culture, where agnostics like F. D. Maurice and Sidgwick were among his direct colleagues, became a regular contributor to the Christian Observer, the foremost Evangelical outlet of the time. Another example is furnished by Venn’s delivery of the prestigious Hulsean Lectures in the same period. Originally established to have a learned clergyman show evidence for revealed religion for a Cambridge audience, Venn seized the opportunity to turn arguments put forward in The Logic of Chance into a logic of scientific and religious belief—an anticipation of Cambridge pragmatism preached in Great St. Mary’s Church.

Venn’s personal identities—both religious and academic—and his theoretical interests started to overlap much more decidedly after he quit his almost-thirty-year career in logic and started to devote himself to other pursuits. There was a clear line, for example, from his professional work on the applications of probability theory and the nature of scientific method to the statistical analysis of measurement of human characteristics in which Venn became involved in the late 1880s. Where this hands-on statistical work fed into Venn’s preparation of a new series of lectures for the Moral Sciences Tripos in 1891 (incidentally the first-ever lecture course on the theory of statistics in Britain), the collaboration with Galton took place outside the institutional confines of Cambridge and crossed then-still-porous disciplinary boundaries. Rather than a scientific interest per se, it was arguably also a spiritual search that drew Venn to the study of mental phenomena. Like others at Cambridge disillusioned with the religion of their youth but unwilling to accept that everything in the world could be explained in purely mechanical terms, as Thomas Henry Huxley and other scientific naturalists argued, Venn for some time in the mature stage of his religious development sought in psychophysical research an empirical justification of his extranatural needs. Moreover, although Venn turned to historical and antiquarian research primarily as an escape from logic, the methods that characterized his logical oeuvre and which he put to more practical use in anthropometry also informed his many authoritative historical volumes and biographical dictionaries. On a more personal level, Venn’s contributions to the college magazine and addresses in the College Chapel as well as tomes ranging from Biographical History of Gonville and Caius College and Annals of a Clerical Family to Alumni Cantabrigienses also added a strong historical dimension to what it meant for him to be a Venn, a Cantabrigian, and a Caian.

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For a biographer, Venn is both dream and nightmare. One of the striking aspects of Venn is the substantial amount of largely unexplored materials that he—following good Venn family custom—left behind. Venn himself inherited a large family archive of diaries, personal and spiritual narratives, letters, and papers, which stretched back to the mid-eighteenth century. To this, he added some of his own letters, both family and academic related, and his own autobiography, with the intention of passing them on to the next generations. Together with his published oeuvre, these materials make it possible to see the big picture of Venn’s life and work. This embarrassment of riches, however, goes hand in hand with two major challenges. First, there is the fact that his 150-page autobiography stops in 1866—when his first book appeared—and that his letters from the 1870s and 1880s—his most productive years as a logician—are almost strictly professional. Hence, there is considerable limit to the extent to which the story about this period can integrate his personal life and academic work. Secondly, there is the great distance that Venn himself seems to have experienced between his life and thought, between his inner self and his pursuits as a professional Cambridge logician. “Logic, as you know, is a hobby of mine,” Venn only half-jokingly wrote to a friend in 1883: “I frankly admit that no healthy mind unless carefully and artificially warped can take any interest in such a subject.”6 Indeed, in sharp contrast to a Mill or a Sidgwick, almost none of the one thousand pages with which Venn had by then established a solid academic reputation for himself seem to have been really meaningful to him. Neither Symbolic Logic nor The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic, for example, contained ideas or expressed opinions that were important to him personally or that explicitly reflected convictions or profound thoughts going beyond technical matters. Of course, there were exceptions, among which Venn’s Hulsean Lectures for 1869 stand out especially clearly: their main pragmatist argument—that of testing out one’s religious beliefs by living by the doctrine in question—resonated deeply with his own theological position at that time. One other exception is the topic that may be said to capture one sense in which there existed a continuity between his books on logic: that of the relationship between individuals and collectives, which stands at the heart of The Logic of Chance and occurs in Symbolic Logic in the form of visual diagrams that express relations of inclusion or exclusion among classes.7 This sense of continuity, which also extends to Venn’s historical research, was implicit, however, and may well express a preoccupation of which Venn himself was largely unaware, as he did not write about or reflect on it. As things were, Venn never espoused an integration of life and thought, of existential and theoretical themes, or at least he never managed to do so: becoming a logician had allowed him to escape from familial and paternal expectations, but being a logician also turned out to be a sacrifice. “He enjoyed all the pleasures of fascination; but he was not fascinated,”8 as Macaulay once wrote. Looking to integrate life and work, the Venn biographer finds a deep and self-conscious rift that sometimes, and increasingly strongly as the years passed, took the shape of a fascinating struggle to coincide with himself, to make life and work one. At the end of his long life, when Venn had quit logic and dedicated himself entirely to the study of the past, this struggle transformed into the rather melancholy experience of nostalgia for something that had never really been his. A worldless Victorian, Venn clung more and more to the bygone Clapham days and the superior lives of those who had gone before him.

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The book’s chronological narrative is structured around major periods and events in Venn’s life and work. Some chapters are either mostly biographical (chapters 1–3) or mostly theoretical (chapters 6–9 and 11), whereas in the other chapters these aspects strongly overlap. Chapters 1–3 describe a series of successive periods in Venn’s personal life: family, childhood and youth (chapter 1); his student days (chapter 2); and his time as curate (chapter 3). Chapters 6–9 and 11 discuss the different parts of Venn’s logical oeuvre: probability in The Logic of Chance (chapter 6), religious logic in the Hulsean Lectures (chapter 7), the transitional papers on the foundations of logic (chapter 8), deductive algebraic logic in Symbolic Logic (chapter 9) and inductive logic and scientific methodology in The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic (chapter 11). These chapters have been written to be of interest to specialists while being as readable as possible for anyone without a background in logic or philosophy of science. They break new ground not only by presenting Venn’s oeuvre as a coherent whole but also by tracing its origins, underlying themes, development, and legacy. The book’s other chapters deal, in turn, with Venn’s intellectual breakthrough as a young curate (chapter 4), his academic and clerical life in the 1860s (chapter 5), his scientific and religious life in the 1880s and 1890s (chapter 10), and his pursuits as the biographer of his university, college, and family (chapter 12). The epilogue reflects on Venn’s old age of leisurely pursuits at Cambridge, focusing on the period during the First World War.

When thinking of a roadmap to the book, it is hard to resist the temptation to use the image of a Venn diagram. Without pushing the analogy too far, it may be said that while it is of course possible to read only selected chapters or parts of the book—as if they were separate circles—it is their overlaps—showing similarities and differences—that matter.

1

Family, Childhood, and Youth

(1834–53)

The most important fact about the life of John Venn was that he was born into the Venn family, whose twin heritage of a clerical and an Evangelical dynasty created the expectations that he was to live up to and determined his room for existential maneuver. His father, Henry Venn, was the long-serving honorary secretary to the Church Missionary Society (CMS); his paternal grandfather, also John Venn, ministered to the famous coterie known as the Clapham Sect; and another Henry Venn, his great-grandfather, was the author of The Complete Duty of Man, an eighteenth-century tract that for many generations served as the key practical handbook to the Evangelical system of Christian values.

A typical Claphamite family, the household in which Venn grew up did not only adhere to the Evangelical standard of family life but also actively participated in furthering that standard publicly. Around the time of Venn’s birth, his father, Henry Venn of CMS, added two sermons to the biography of his grandfather, which his own father, John Venn of Clapham, had left unfinished. These sermons elaborated the importance of family religion and the religious responsibilities of all family members to each other. Perhaps more than any other Claphamite family, there was a strong strand of historical tradition to the Venn family’s Evangelicalism, one concentrated around the examples set by committed Evangelical “saints” in the male line, which were documented in published biographies and in family reminiscences gathered together in a volume called Parentalia.

This chapter will explore Venn’s upbringing as the private application of the familial ideal that the Venn family self-consciously created. Drawing on the extensive family archive—primarily the Parentalia and Annals of a Clerical Family—as well as Venn’s own autobiographical recollections recorded in the “Annals,” it is possible to develop an understanding of the Venn family household as a domestic site where certain Evangelical ideals and standards were turned into practice. The aim is to find in John Venn’s motherless youth a starting point of his religious identity, to be built on in future chapters, while contributing to a better grasp of the nature of an Evangelical upbringing, in which God permeated every part of daily life, within one of the most prominent Evangelical families of the Victorian era.

Another important theme alongside religion is that of Venn’s Evangelical youth being one of lost opportunities, both religiously and intellectually. Looking back, he himself would find the main cause of this in an utter lack of informal encouragement, open discussion, and counterbalancing viewpoints experienced at home or at school. These factors would eventually become of great significance in Venn’s search for his own identity, which started when he went up to Cambridge in 1853, and intensified upon his return in 1862.

The Venn Family: Evangelical, Clerical, and Academic Dynasty

The name Venn belongs to the class of place names and originally referred to the two great fen districts in the east and west of England from which sprang those who first obtained the name around the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.1 John Venn descended from one of three families once living on the borders of Somerset and Devon: the Venns (or “Fenns”) who worked as well-to-do yeomen and farmers in the neighboring villages of Broadhembury and Peyhembury, and whose common lineage went back to the times of Edward I.

From the sixteenth until the early twentieth century, the Broadhembury family, to which John Venn belonged and of which another John Venn (d. 1594/95) is the earliest traceable member, remained closely connected to the county of Devonshire. After having graduated from the Devonian Exeter College, Oxford, in 1591, William Venn (1569–1621), the youngest son of John Venn, lived his whole life as a vicar at Otterton. His son, the Royalist clergyman Richard Venn (1601–64), who in 1619 also graduated from Exeter College, Oxford, and who succeeded his father at the vicarage of Otterton in 1625, would take refuge in the Broadhembury family home after having been expelled from his living by Cromwellian rebels around the close of the English Civil War. Dennis Venn (1648–95), the third of nine children of Richard Venn’s second marriage, continued the brief academic and lifelong clerical career of his father and grandfather. After graduating from Exeter College, Oxford, in 1669, he returned to his native county, where he was ordained priest in 1670/71. He was appointed to the vicarage of Holbeton, a village some fifty miles southwest of Broadhembury, where he died and was buried in 1694/95. Some two hundred years later, around 1900, John Venn would make a pilgrimage to Devonshire, taking pictures of the parish churches and rectories of his ancestors in and around Broadhembury, including Otterton and Holbeton.

John, William, Richard, and Dennis Venn: all these four of what would eventually be nine successive generations of Venns appearing in the clergy list of the Church of England would live on only in early deeds, suits at law, calendars of will, and parish registers. Richard Venn (1691–1793), the eldest son of his father, Dennis Venn, and mother, Patience Gay (d. 1712), was the first whose name and life would become part of the living memory of the Venn family, as recorded in its unpublished family book, the Parentalia.2 Richard Venn, who spent his entire clerical career in London, where he acted as rector of St. Antholin, represented the first of five successive generations of Venns to graduate at Cambridge. The fact that he did not enter the college and university of his forefathers was due to his being moved, at the age of sixteen, from a school in Modbury, a few miles from his father’s vicarage in Holbeton, to Blundell’s school in Tiverton. This free grammar school had been founded around 1604 by the will of Peter Blundell, a wealthy Puritan merchant born in Tiverton who had carefully defined how he envisioned his school: 150 boys, either born or brought up in Tiverton or “Forreyners” of “honest Reputation” and “feare of God” as chosen by householders of Tiverton “without regarding the riche above or more than the poore,” would be eligible.3 Blundell also bestowed the money for the establishment of six scholarships at Oxford and Cambridge for pupils from his own grammar school. During the 1610s, the executors of his will succeeded in carrying out Blundell’s wishes: Balliol College, Oxford, was given £700 for the purchase of lands in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, to support one Blundell Scholar and one Blundell Fellow, and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, £1,400 for the purchase of lands in Clea, Lincolnshire, to support two Blundell Scholars and two Blundell Fellows.4 Though not himself a Tivertonian, it was to one of these latter two scholarships that the young Blundell graduate Richard Venn was elected in the summer of 1709. After graduating BA in January 1712/13 and MA in 1716 from Sidney Sussex College, he was passed over for a Blundell Fellowship in 1716/17 because of his marriage in 1716 with Marie Anna Isabella Margaretta Beatrice Ashton (1689–1762)—godchild of Queen Mary Beatrice, the second wife of the Stuart king James II and IV, the last Roman Catholic monarch of England, and the daughter of John Ashton, a staunch supporter of the Stuart dynasty executed in 1690 for high treason against the co-monarchs William III and Mary II.

Richard Venn was a typical High Churchman; he was loyal to an Anglo-Catholic vision of the Church of England as episcopal, sacramental, liturgical, and uniform, and he was committed to a Tory vision of the Crown according to which the monarchy was jus divinum and the divine right of succession hereditary.5 Given this outlook, he firmly opposed all Latitudinarians or Broad Churchmen, who favored a broader church that gave latitude to nonconformists. Instead, he leaned toward the Jacobites, who, like his father-in-law, John Ashton, regarded the exiled James II and IV as the only rightful king of England. As a father, Richard Venn preferred the system of Solomon to that of Rousseau. Some of his four children nonetheless managed to choose their own path in life. His youngest son, Edward Venn (1717–80), upon graduating from St. John’s College, Cambridge, and deciding not to take Holy Orders, devoted himself to the study of medicine as a pupil of Herman Boerhaave, the famous professor of medicine, chemistry, and botany at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. Edward’s younger brother Richard Venn (1718–91) worked as a silk mercer in London, where his sister, Mary Venn (1720/21–91), lived with her husband, an eminent tea broker. Upon his retirement in 1785, this Richard Venn went to live with his younger brother, Henry Venn (1725–97), the prominent vicar of Huddersfield and rector of Yelling.

Henry Venn was the first in the male line of Broadhembury Venns whose life was documented in a published “domestic biography”—a new literary genre that grew out of the practice of private family writing, sometimes in shorthand, in which many members of the Venn family were prolific.6 The large number of diaries, journals, household recollections, autobiographical sketches, and genealogical and deathbed notes as well as the public biographies, collected letters, and sermons that the Venns produced between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries were not written out of a sheer interest in family history for its own sake. All writings reported on individual spiritual experiences and promoted rigorous and humbling self-examination, keeping religious progress under review, drawing divine lessons from worldly events, and celebrating the pious and devout lives of saintly ancestors. As such, they bore witness to Henry Venn’s conversion from High Church orthodoxy to Evangelicalism in the early 1750s. The Venns carefully documented this conversion experience; by doing so, they immortalized it as a case of sudden and heartfelt spiritual awakening and new birth—rather typical among other leading figures of the Evangelical revival, such as John Wesley and George Whitefield—and furthered the conversion narrative of all those ordinary women and men, including Claphamites, who had a similar experience in the eighteenth century.7 Henry Venn’s conversion was said to be the result, not of being persuaded by the Evangelical writings of others, but of rigorous self-discipline and independent study of the Bible.8 John Venn of Clapham, writing in an unfinished memoir, willfully downplayed his father’s debt to the Methodist leaders Wesley and Whitefield, emphasizing instead that the transformation away from High Churchmanship to Evangelicalism was due solely to “a steady progress of mind,” one “unbiassed by an attachment to human systems.”9 One of the Venn’s favorite mythologized reminiscences about Henry Venn was the following. Despite his youthful zeal for the church, religion had made no real impression on Henry Venn’s mind until the late 1740s. Around that time, having been suddenly struck by one of his daily prayers (“That I may live to the glory of Thy name!”), he started to live his life according to the ideal of Christian perfection as laid down in William Law’s A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1729). Rather than making him religiously happy, however, the devotional exercise—the seasons for meditations, the frequent fasts, the chanting of the Te Deum, and the diaries recording his slightest “irregular desires and passions”—only made him aware of his own deficiency and his inability to attain the standard of holiness that he himself set for his congregation at London. Not much later, upon discovering views in one of Law’s newer books, probably The Spirit of Prayer (1749–50), that he considered unsound, he reportedly exclaimed: “Then, farewell to such a guide! Henceforth I will call no man master!”10 Another favorite family anecdote described the episode when Henry Venn found out that the zeal with which he preached his new Evangelical message in Clapham offended the wealthy London merchants who came to his services “only to enjoy themselves.”11 Early in 1759, he was offered the much larger but considerably less valuable parish of Huddersfield, Yorkshire, through the Earl of Dartmouth, an intimate friend and one of Lady Huntingdon’s Evangelical converts. After hesitating for several weeks, in which he traveled from Clapham to Huddersfield on horseback to make his decision on the spot, he accepted the living, confident that his usefulness in this poor parish—which he found in “worse than Egyptian darkness”—would outweigh his own financial sacrifice.12 Henry Venn left Huddersfield in 1771, moving to Yelling, from where he would exert a significant Evangelical influence on several young students at Cambridge, such as Charles Simeon and William Farish, who from the 1780s to 1790s frequently crossed the open and unenclosed land that separated Yelling from the university town.13

These and other impressions from the Evangelical life of Henry Venn were used by the Venns to turn him into a saint setting an example for fellow Evangelicals. The Life and a Selection from the Letters of Henry Venn (1834), a work commenced by his own son, John Venn of Clapham, and compiled by his grandson, Henry Venn of CMS, was presented as a manifesto “intended to display the Evangelical thought and practice as illustrated at their best.”14 As the young Henry Venn wrote about the volume in 1829: “a more interesting and profitable employment we could not have; the man is fully placed before us, in his domestic engagements, in his ministerial labours, and in his more private hours, and the impression left on our minds is such as I desire to cherish for ever—that real religion makes a Divine change in the heart.”15

Henry Venn’s only son, John Venn of Clapham (1759–1813), was born at Clapham and grew up among the prominent Evangelicals visiting the family in Huddersfield. After having been his father’s pupil for some years, John Venn entered Cambridge in October 1776, commencing residence there in October 1777. Henry Venn’s original plan had been to send his son up to Trinity College, in the cloisters of which he himself had walked some twenty years before. Henry Venn and other Evangelicals who remained within the Anglican Church had close links with the Evangelical group at Cambridge. Many university dons of the Anglican bastion that Cambridge, despite its growing religious tolerance, then still was continued to be highly suspicious of Evangelicalism. When Henry Venn attempted to register his son at Trinity College, the tutor and master hesitated to admit him because of fear of Methodism.16 Henry Venn himself had belonged to the Yorkshire Evangelical-Anglican group that had chosen Magdalene as the home for their Elland Clerical Society, a fund founded to promote the education of Evangelical ordination candidates.17 For his own son, he chose Sidney Sussex, the college of his own father, which had had a Protestant agenda ever since its establishment in 1596.

Much to his father’s lament, John Venn was admitted in 1776 as a sizar, the lowest social class consisting of sons of the poorer clergy and small farmers. Around April 1777, however, a half year before he went into residence, he won a scholarship that enabled him to become a pensioner like the majority of the undergraduates. His college life was that of the uneventful kind of the studious and quiet man reading classics and mathematics, then the only topics on the Cambridge curriculum. He found time for wider reading in history and science and for other interests. Despite his shyness, he became the informal leader of a small group of soul-searching friends, among which was Charles Simeon, who soon became a confidant of the Evangelical patriarch Henry Venn and who himself did much to promote the Evangelical revival in its second and third generations.18 John Venn’s university career was not a particularly successful one. He graduated BA (1781) as sixth on the list of third-class junior optimes—consisting of the honors students ranking below the second-class senior optimes and first-class wranglers—and he was passed over for a college fellowship in 1782. After he was ordained deacon in September 1782, he left Cambridge and began his clerical work as curate to his father at Yelling. While his friends Simeon, William Farish, and Joseph and Henry Jowett were receiving their fellowships at Cambridge, John Venn accepted the living of Little Dunham, a small and remote Norfolk village, where he would spend ten years of his life, establishing new traditions (monthly sacrament, rectory meetings, alehouse visits, the Dunham Meeting of Clergy) with only very limited success.

It was in April 1792 that John Venn was offered the living of Clapham, the populous and educated village on London’s outskirts with which his name would become chiefly associated. There he continued his role as organizer of one of a growing number of Evangelical clerical societies that had become an important means to strengthen ties of friendship and cooperation among Evangelical clergymen living isolated in “unheralded” and “obscure ministries,” often dismissed by both Anglicans and dissenters.19 Throughout the eighteenth century, the Evangelical movement in the Church of England had been like “a rope of sand,” and it was only as the small, dispersed group of devout Evangelical clergymen—Samuel Taylor in Truro, James Stillingfleet in Hotham, John Venn in Dunham and Clapham—united and grew in number that Evangelicalism prepared the ground for its all-pervasive impact on Victorian Britain.20 Within this development, the informal yet powerful group of “spiritual children of old Henry Venn,” known by the notoriously misleading name of the “Clapham Sect,” played a crucially important role.21 From the 1790s on, the Thorntons, Wilberforces, Stephens, Macaulays, Venns, and other core families belonging to the “colony of heaven” at Clapham successfully pursued their two projects—the abolition of the slave trade and the reform of public morals—establishing the Church Missionary Society (CMS) (1799) and founding the first major British colony in Africa (Freetown, Sierra Leone) (1792). When John Venn and his wife, Catherine, arrived in Clapham in March 1793, Henry Thornton and his cousin and brother-in-law William Wilberforce had recently settled at Battersea Rise, on Clapham Common. Together with their seven children, of which Henry Venn of CMS was the oldest son, the Venns became part of the “large united family” of which every Claphamite was considered and through intermarriage often became a member.22 The genealogical ties of the Claphamites would remain intact until the early twentieth century—several well-known Bloomsbury figures being direct descendants of the “intellectual aristocracy” bred and created at Clapham.23 John Venn’s second daughter, Jane, for example, married James Stephen’s third son, James Stephen, among whose children was Leslie Stephen, the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell.

While Britain was at war with revolutionary (1793–1802) and Napoleonic (1803–15) France, John Venn steadily carved out his place at the center of religious and civil life at Clapham. Apart from being its spiritual leader, turning Anglicanism into a seven-days-a-week religion that was part of everyday life, he was also actively involved in the sect’s missionary and philanthropic endeavors as the main originator of the CMS and cofounder of both the Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor (1796) and the Christian Observer (1802).

When John Venn’s first wife, Catherine, died in April 1803, his sister Jane Venn took care of him and his children. During the years that followed, in which he suffered almost-constant illness, he wrote several contributions to the Christian Observer, participated in the work of the CMS; taught his daughters English history, Latin, and Euclidean geometry; and, like his own father had done, prepared his son for Cambridge. John Venn died in the Clapham rectory house in 1813, aged fifty-four, and was buried several days later in Clapham’s old churchyard, in the same grave with his father.24

Henry Venn was born at Clapham in 1796 and spent his childhood as an early-maturing boy among the members of the Clapham Sect. He was sent to Cambridge to escape the ballot for the militia and to prepare for college with Professor William Farish, an old family connection, and his older cousin Henry Venn Elliott.25 In October 1814, he entered Queens’ College, where the prominent Evangelical convert Isaac Milner was president. With Magdalene having become of a decidedly non-Evangelical stripe after Samuel Hey, the master who had welcomed students supported by the Elland Society, was replaced in 1797, Isaac Milner’s Queens’ College was the natural choice for any Claphamite son. At Cambridge, Henry Venn was soon adopted into the small and tightly knit group of “Sims”—the followers of Simeon, who had become a highly influential figure in Cambridge and the Church of England through his Evangelical preaching at Holy Trinity and his famous Friday evening conversation parties. Much like his father, Henry Venn was a serious reading man. After graduating BA in 1818 as nineteenth wrangler, he was elected as a fellow of Queens’ College, and a few months later he was ordained by the bishop of Ely, allowing him to take up a curacy. Given the estimation in which Evangelicals were then still held by the majority in the Church of England, despite their working “with the grain of establishment sentiment,” finding a parish was not an easy task.26 Around January 1821, having declined a foreign chaplaincy and a country curacy, he accepted St. Dunstan’s, Fleet Street, in London, a densely populated parish of six thousand poor inhabitants once served by John Donne and William Romaine. Henry Venn never became a popular preacher. R. B. Seeley, the father of the eminent historian and John Venn’s Cambridge friend John Seeley, would recall that owing to the “quietness of demeanour” and “freedom from ambition,” no one had ever anticipated the “degree and extent of influence in the Church” that Henry Venn would come to exert as a missionary statesman.27

Henry Venn resigned his curacy in 1824, returning to Cambridge to obtain the bachelor of divinity degree required of every fellow of Queens’ College. At Cambridge, where he joined his younger brother John, he studied theology, attended lectures on modern history and medicine, and was successively appointed lecturer, dean, and assistant tutor of Queens’ College; junior proctor of the university; and evening lecturer of St. Mary’s Church. He never truly felt at home in college life, however, and in 1827 he returned to clerical work, accepting the living of Drypool offered to him by William Wilberforce, another prominent family friend.

Around that time, Drypool—a “dirty suburb of Hull”—was about “as uninviting a parish as could be found in England.”28 The place also had its benefits, however, as Henry Venn’s residence there led to his reacquaintance with Martha Sykes, whom he had first met when visiting the Nicholas Sykes family, wealthy relatives of the Thorntons, in 1824. Living some ten miles apart, they soon developed what they considered a bond of “mental union” and mutual “spiritual guidance,” which remained intact during their eleven years together.29 A few days before their marriage in January 1829, Henry Venn followed the university’s official prohibition and resigned his fellowship. For the next five and a half years, he set to work at Drypool, not only performing his usual clerical duties but also introducing a novel scheme of Sunday schools, founding the Clothing Society, and organizing regular meetings in support of the CMS. It was in October 1834, two years after the birth of their first daughter, and two months after that of their first son, that the young family moved to London, where Henry Venn accepted the curacy of St. John’s Holloway, which was in the gift of Daniel Wilson, vicar of Islington. The fourteen years that the family would spend there marked a great change in Henry Venn’s work and public position, transforming him from the “zealous parish clergyman” to the practical head of one of the largest religious organizations in the country.30 At the same time, the years also covered a period of trial and suffering, which started in the summer of 1838, when “dark clouds gathered about his path.”31

Childhood

John Venn (henceforth “Venn”) was born at Drypool, Hull, on 4 August 1834, his older sister, Henrietta, having been born there almost two years earlier on 8 October 1832. Their father, Henry Venn, had come to Drypool in 1827–28 as a “solitary stranger.”32 When the family left for St. John’s Holloway, London, in October 1834, he looked back and concluded that God “has made my cup run over with domestic happiness” and “fulfilled every desire of my heart”: “He gave me the heart of my people, a precious wife, two sweet children, and a large accession of affectionate friends.”33

During the first few years in London, the Venn family was on the whole a fairly happy one.34 After occupying several other houses temporarily, in the course of 1838, the year in which Henry (“Harry”) was born, they finally settled at 9 Hornsey Lane, Highgate, near Hampstead Heath, with the “smoky signs of the docks, and ships on the Thames” in the distance.35 The house itself was inconvenient and far from beautiful, but the children’s early childhood was made very fair by its magnificent four-acre garden, where they played without interference from their governess and nurse and were tutored about flora and fauna by James Boston, the old gardener, and Robert, the manservant.36 The pond, the rookery, the large lawn suitable for cricket, the extensive kitchen garden, and the cedar, arbutus, elms, and Spanish chestnuts so imprinted themselves on the young Venn’s mind that the garden would occasionally appear in his dreams throughout his entire life.

At St. John’s Holloway, Henry Venn’s parochial district extended from “near the top of Highgate Hill for two miles towards London, stopping just short of Highbury Terrace,” all residences being “on the sides of the Great North Road, with green fields beyond on each side.”37 Henry and Martha Venn both threw themselves into parish work. Besides his clerical duties, Henry Venn established the Institution for Promoting Useful and Religious Knowledge, which featured a lending library, reading room, and scientific lectures whose official aim was the “improvement of the mind, by cultivation of science and general knowledge, in subservience to the interests of morality and the glory of God.”38 Martha Venn, for her part, also took an active interest in the parish, founding the Grove-lane Infants’ School, which the Venn family erected and maintained entirely at their own expense. The small building, situated in the churchyard of St. John’s, and designed in a simple neo-Gothic style by the architect E. B. Lamb, accommodated sixty-three children and a teacher living in the rooms above the classroom.39

Henry and Martha Venn were soulmates devoted to each other and highly conscious of the spiritual aspects of their marriage.40 Whereas Henry Venn added his private ministerial duty as a husband and father to his public ministerial labors, Martha Venn was expected to act not only as a temporal but also as a spiritual helpmeet, watching over him and pointing out his faults.41 Following the Evangelical standard of a household found in The Complete Duty of Man, they both took their role as parents very seriously, seeing it as a grave responsibility and honor to model the earthly family on the heavenly one and to raise their children in Christian grace through watchfulness and encouragement.42 Martha Venn took charge of Henrietta, John, and Henry’s early upbringing, with Henry Venn describing his wife as “a spiritual instructor to your husband, children & all in your house.”43 Within the Evangelical religious framework, in which the significance of the home was greatly elevated, much status was given to the religious role of a woman within the domestic sphere.44 Martha Venn kept a little notebook, begun in 1838 and later continued by her husband, in which she recorded the children’s illnesses and vaccinations as well as the incidents illustrative of their religious progress.45 Since she strongly believed that Christianity was a “religion of motives,” with God looking into the heart and judging the spirit in which acts were performed, not just the acts themselves, Martha Venn introduced religion gently rather than through force.46 Henrietta, John, and Henry Venn grew up in a domestic religious environment where they were brought up to want to pray, live religiously, and adopt the Evangelical principles of their own free will, not merely out of obedience or decency. Neither Venn nor any of the other Clapham descendants of his own generation seemed to have had any recollection of a strict regime of discipline and punishment during childhood.47 Indeed, what was feared most by Evangelical parents was that children would in one way or the other become nominal or “patent Christians” who, as James Stephen wrote, “indifferently accepted imperfectly understood half-truths.”48 Henry and Martha Venn therefore rejoiced and eagerly looked for any demonstration of religious sensibility in the young Henrietta, John, and Henry. For example, when in April 1844 the nine-year-old Venn caught a whooping cough and developed symptoms of inflammation of the lungs, his father made an entry into their notebook, writing that he went to his son and “told him he was very ill & we could not tell whether he [would] recover—asked him if he prayed himself—he said ‘yes’—I asked him what do you say?”49 The young Venn showed a “lively sense of God’s mercy & goodness” when answering his father’s question with “great simplicity & self-possession”:

“O Lord pardon my sins before I die—that when I die I may go to heaven—& make me well again if it be thy will, for Jesus X’s sake”—After a little pause—he said: “Papa, I feel afraid to die”. I read a few passages of Scripture & he [was] cheerful again.50

With an eye to giving their children’s religiosity a timely start, Henry and Martha Venn began the education of childish faculties to act religiously of their own accord from very early on. Given the emphasis of household worship, Henrietta, John, and Henry were taught to pray well before the age of four.51 Henry and Martha Venn also took to heart the advice in The Complete Duty of Man to find the most suitable method of making “divine knowledge pleasant to the souls of children.”52 For example, since the young Henry disliked churchgoing and Sunday prayers, in his case emphasis was put on Bible stories, in which he delighted. As middle-class parents with leisure time on their hands, Henry and Martha Venn’s duty toward their children went much further than those of poor parents, who were allowed to limit themselves to correction for lying, swearing, and quarreling. They were expected, and duly expected of themselves, to watch for opportunities to “give life to religious instruction” by appealing to “outward things” and “particular providences.”53 For example, when horse riding or traveling with their children, Henry and Martha Venn took to heart advises from The Complete Duty of Man such as the following: “Point out to them, in the spring, when the whole country is arrayed in all its beauty, what their eyes attest, the wide-extended bounty of God; that it is his sun which imparts its genial warmth to make the ground fruitful; that he causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man, and bread to strengthen man’s heart, and oil and wine to make him of a cheerful countenance.”54 During their early childhood in an Evangelical home, where the family unit was turned into a cradle of religion and the domestic setting into a center for worship and spiritual training, the Venn children were constantly encouraged to recognize God’s providence everywhere and in everything.

Having already suffered the loss of a daughter dying in infancy in 1837, the family’s active and happy life at Highgate came to a sudden end in 1838–39, when Henry Venn barely recovered from a dangerous heart attack and Martha Venn developed symptoms of consumption. For the sake of their health, the whole family moved to Brighton in August 1838 and, in October of that same year, to Leamington, where they stayed for several months. After a summer tour to Bath, Hereford, and Wales in their own two-horse carriage, they spent the winter of 1839 in Torquay, where Martha Venn died on 21 March 1840. “I remember my father coming into the room and telling us that she was gone,” Venn later recalled, “my sister bursting into tears . . . ; and my doing the same, rather from sympathy with her than from appreciation of what it meant.”55 Martha Venn was buried in the vault under St. John’s Holloway—Henry Venn having traveled by sea, with her body, from Plymouth to London together with his brother. After the funeral, Henry Venn returned to Torquay to bring his children back to Basingstoke in the same vehicle in which he had been accustomed to take many long drives around England with his wife, from where the mourning yet allegedly “perfectly peaceful” family took the new South Western train to London.56 Among Venn’s earliest memories was one about this very homeward journey, sitting beside his father, calling his attention “to the vast open waste of Salisbury plain, and my being perched [by the nurse] on one of the smaller blocks at Stonehenge, in order to get a view of that most impressive ruins.”57

Martha Venn’s illness and death were extensively documented by her husband in a set of notes that charted the progress of the illness; recalled their final conversations, thoughts, and prayers; and culminated in a list of lessons to be learned from these tragic events.58 Shortly after his wife’s death, Henry Venn also prepared a memorandum for their children and intimate friends, again documenting the decline of her health, her religious observance, and her demeanor in facing illness and death.59 Martha Venn herself left an unfinished paper, written in Henry Venn’s hand, addressed to Henrietta, John, and Henry, in which she described her wishes for them.60 All these documents illustrated the importance that the Venn family, like the Claphamites before them and like so many of their Evangelical contemporaries, attached to a “good death,” or “dying well,” believing that the moment of death was close to that of judgment.61 Not unlike their happy home, Martha Venn’s final illness was stage managed to a certain extent for the benefit of the family and, especially, the children in order that “they might have no terrific impressions respecting death—but as far as possible those of an opposite kind.”62 She was carefully portrayed by her husband as having died “in the bosom of her family,” cheerfully accepting both her illness and her death as acts of divine providence and preparing herself through “religious observance.”63 Evangelicals like Henry and Martha Venn believed that proximity to the dying could be profitable to the souls of young children insofar as it reminded them to live and act sub specie aeternitatis.64 After the death of their mother in 1840, Henry Venn continued to talk and write to Henrietta, John, and Henry in terms of her continuing existence in heaven and their heavenly reunion, both to comfort them and to encourage them to regard death “with longing & joy.”65 “Oh what a meeting that will be when dear Mama & many others whom I have loved as well as you loved her tho’ you knew them, all meet together before the throne of God & the Lamb,” wrote Henry Venn in a letter to his children in July 1841, reminding them: “True it is necessary that we die before we can have this joy . . . but when we know that Jesus has overcome death & opened unto us the gate of everlasting life—then we shall cease to fear & dislike death.”66

There existed, of course, a distance between the literary ideal of a good Christian death and reality.67 Martha Venn herself was not without fear, particularly with regard to the future of her three children. She not only regretted having neglected to provide her only daughter with instructions in domestic matters but also feared that her husband might be offered a colonial bishopric in an overseas outpost of the Church of England far away from the children at Highgate.68

Venn’s early, motherless life at home was not a joyous one, though it was “far from being actually unhappy.”69 At the time, he did not fully appreciate what the death of his mother meant, but over the years the loss proved irreparable in that it hampered the “very power of enjoyment” as a child and left him in a “morbid & solitary mood” as he grew older.70 As he later wrote, “I can’t in any way whatever blame my father; it is just the difference between what the father & mother can realize.”71 Henry Venn himself was aware of the fact that it was impossible even for the most devoted father, spiritually at least, to wholly replace a mother. A few months after the death of his wife, he briefly contemplated a marriage with his cousin-in-law, Marianne Thornton of Clapham.72 Because he feared that she would not be in in sufficient sympathy with the Evangelical party, however, the “potentially wonderful” plan never came off.73

After a trip abroad to recover his health shortly after the funeral, Henry Venn had immediately returned to parish duties in Holloway and worked increasingly regularly at the Missionary House, Salisbury Square, of the CMS, the organization that had been cofounded and chaired by his father in 1799 and in which he himself would exercise for thirty years “a unique influence” as honorary secretary and virtual director.74 It was now left to him alone to watch over the religious development of his children, though he was sometimes helped by a governess. Following his grandfather’s call in The Complete Duty of Man to model the earthly family on the heavenly one, Henry Venn continued to take seriously his duty as father in educating them to lead active and useful lives and in providing for their spiritual welfare. A common theme in his overarching attempt to convey religion in largely positive terms was to use the family as a metaphor, depicting God as a loving, paternal figure, rather than a stern judge, and juxtaposing his own love for them as their earthly father and the “infinitely greater care” of the heavenly father.75 When at home, he heard his children’s prayers and read the Bible with them on Sunday; when away, he referred to these gatherings in his letters and directed them to certain hymns or asked them to read a specific passage.76 Each of these frequent letters was deeply religious in tone, offering a prayer, describing a church service, or encouraging the children in their family duty to “stir each other up” religiously.77 All this contributed to Henry Venn’s wish to bring them up with a pragmatic and practical Evangelicalism, in which God permeated every part of life and in which they were brought to live from a spiritual perspective, aiming at proper conduct. The importance of duty, of accountability to God, and of awareness of the priority of religious over emotional considerations were daily impressed on the Venn children, for example, when their father explained to them the need for his many absences from home: “I have the opportunity of assisting in conferring a great benefit upon the Church of Christ, and I am sure that if I were to sacrifice duty to the exceeding great pleasure of joining you both you and I should suffer rather than gain by it.”78 In 1846, when his oldest son was twelve years old, Henry Venn resigned his living at St. John’s Holloway, hoping that it would allow him to work full time for the CMS and, as he told his curate Edmonstone, also to spend more time with his children.79 In reality, however, the work consumed almost all his time and attention; in consequence of his dedication, by the 1850s Henry Venn was recognized as a leader of the Evangelical and missionary cause.80

Despite his many absences, and his ever-increasing absorption in his work, Henry Venn was the dominating influence of, and key religious influence in, Venn’s childhood. Alongside the general precepts from The Complete Duty of Man, what was paramount to the upbringing of the Venn children was the force of example, both scriptural and personal: they were directed to observe the behavior of true Christians, including that of the Evangelical saint within the home that was their father. As with his cousin Leslie Stephen, what most impressed the young Venn in his early years was not this or that religious idea but the lasting impression made by, and the sheer power of, the Evangelicalism personified by those around him, like his uncle, John Venn of Hereford, and, especially, his own father: “Unlike many parents of decided Evangelical opinions, he [Henry Venn] never spoke much to us about religion. Neither he nor our dear uncle [John Venn of Hereford] ever forced religious advice upon us. . . . Indeed it was needless for them to preach to us. Their lives spoke far more plainly and convincingly than any words.”81 Venn was, and would remain for many years to come, in utter awe of the way in which his father lived his life according to his faith and the impressive strength of the religious example set by his father’s personality: “The superior influence with me was found in my father. . . . He held, with the most unswerving faith the Evangelical opinions he had inherited, and his whole life was an absolutely consistent display of the working of this faith. . . . It was not so much dogmatic teaching of my father’s part as his . . . personality that gave me the initial start in the direction of his own opinions.”82 For Venn, it was not taught theology, but Evangelicalism in practice, in the very shape of his father, that was the crucial religious influence.83 The force of Henry Venn’s example, of his thoroughly religious personality, spreading from Evangelical faith to a particular brand of Protestant churchmanship, would in time become a pivotal aspect of Venn’s own relationship with his inherited religion.

Henry Venn’s influence on his oldest son was matched only by their lack of intimacy of discourse and spiritual confidence.84 Like other Claphamite parents, Henry Venn hoped to break down any reserve in the relationship between parent and child, but he was aware that his work for the CMS made it well-nigh impossible for him to engage in such a way with his own son. Many years later, in a birthday letter to Venn, he regretted that “the pressure of my employment when at home has so much interfered with any advantage which you might otherwise have derived from our mutual intercourse.”85 When writing of his father, Venn would paint a picture of a thoughtful and affectionate yet altogether fearful figure, emphasizing the awe and reverence he felt toward him. “When we ran away . . . to escape him, one might really adopt the old explanation of our behaviour—‘I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid.’”86 Venn was quick to add, however, that his father was “very tolerant” and “would I am certain, have been ready and willing to listen to any doubts and difficulties which lay within certain limits.”87 In fact, Venn blamed himself for their lack of intimacy: “It is quite possible that with some exceptional boy—of unusual maturity of character & moral strength—, the relations between father and son might in consequence have been those of perfect confidence and affection. As it was, in my own case, I must admit that there was a very strong infusion of fear; not the fear as of a master, but rather that of a being of a superior order.”88 Venn suggested, in a revealing deletion from this autobiographical fragment, that he always felt his sister, Henrietta, was of the “higher moral stamp” that would permit of such confidence and affection with their father.89

The major theme in Venn’s own narrative of his childhood was that of narrowness and isolation, not only personally, from his father, but also socially and intellectually. Though neither a puritan nor a philistine, because of his wholehearted Evangelicalism it never occurred to Henry Venn that life at home was on the whole “dull & monotonous,” and sometimes even rather “gloomy,” to his children.90 Within the Venn household, the cultural setting in which the religious examples and values were conveyed was that of a moderate yet slightly old-fashioned Evangelical distrust of “worldly amusements”: “Theatres, novel-reading, dancing, cards, etc., were never named or denounced, but the understanding was none the less clear that such things were not for him or his.”91

Henry Venn approved of selected painters, particularly Rubens, and enjoyed Pope’s and Dryden’s poetry, but remained committed to “the old Evangelical objection to novels.”92 Next to Dickens’s weekly magazine Household Words, which was tolerated, there was available a volume of British poetry; two of Borrow’s literary travel journals, Gipsies in Spain and The Bible in Spain; and Scott’s Quentin Durward and Lay of the Last Minstrel.93 One striking consequence of this relative strictness was that when Venn went up to Cambridge several years later, he had read only two novels: Scott’s Quentin Durward, which he had devoured with the “intensest interest” while hiding in “cupboards” and “unoccupied bedrooms,” and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist tract Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which “stood on a ground apart.”94

The Venn family had a comfortable existence in material terms, Henry Venn’s private income being sufficient to maintain a small domestic staff, including a governess and a small number of servants, such as a nurse and a footman, while allowing him to work for the CMS without drawing a salary. It also made it possible for him to create, not exactly a cultured and literary environment like that of the Stephens—whose lay family tradition was one of writers and men of letters—but at least one that aligned their religion with their class and social milieu.95 Venn would, for example, recall his father’s extreme liberality when it came to horse riding and a variety of other pursuits, such as gardening, carpentry, and mechanical experiments.96

Venn’s own awareness of the family’s standing was most clearly illustrated in his later opinion that there were “very few companions of our youth whom, owing to their mental qualities and their social position we could regard as permanent acquaintances.”97 The Venns were a religious but also very much a clerical family, and owing to Henry Venn’s strong sense of the social etiquette attached to his churchmanship, there was very little opportunity for the Venn children for contact beyond immediate family and the circle of clergymen and missionaries who regularly visited them. Venn’s feeling of isolation was strengthened by envy of his father’s upbringing at the Clapham rectory, where he had been surrounded by “a host of eminent and lifelong friends.”98 It was this very same “golden age,” however, that provided the Venn children with a vast network of Claphamite cousins. During their father’s yearly trips to the Swiss mountains, Henrietta, John, and Henry either stayed in Brighton with Elliot and Stephen cousins or were taken in at Hereford by their uncle and aunt John and Emelia Venn, where some of the Gurneys, Diceys, and Stephens joined them.99 Here, the children were welcomed in a “most enjoyable house” and had the chance to make friend with the sons and daughters of clergymen and gentlemen, who supplied “an element greatly lacking at home.”100 Another distraction from daily life at home came in the form of the family’s many summer trips. Both in 1843 and in 1845, Henry Venn took his three children to Wales, where they drove from place to place in open cars and where the young Venn first saw the Welsh mountain scenery of which he would grow fond and to which he would often return.101 After one of their stays at the Stephens’ and Elliotts’ in Brighton, in 1844, the whole family traveled to France, as they had done before in 1836 and 1842, visiting the “old-world life” of Le Havre, Honfleur, and Caen together with Emelia Russell Gurney (née Batten).102 Venn paid his first-ever visit to Cambridge on 16 May 1845, when his father drove the family from London to the Lodge of the President of Queens’s College, his paralyzed old friend Joshua King, where they spent a few days. Some of Venn’s recollections were of the procession of the university boats on the Cam and of King’s sons bowing upon entering the room where their father was.

Although Clapham had disappeared as their geographical center, the close ties between Evangelical families remained firmly intact. The connection with the Stephens was particularly strong. One of Leslie Stephen’s earliest memories was of playing with the Venn children at Highgate; and when his older brother, James Fitzjames Stephen (“Fitzie”), entered King’s College, London in 1845, lodgings were arranged for him at Highgate Hill, within a few doors of his uncle and cousins.

After their mother’s death in 1840, the Venn children were left largely in the charge of the governess, who was a changeable person, and the nurse (“old Bursar”), a “vigorous Yorkshire woman” with little education and even lesser manners who stayed with the family from 1832 until her death in 1868.103 The person to whom the children owed the most at the time was their father’s sister, aunt Emelia, born at Clapham in 1794, and for more than fifty years the companion and helper of her brother John Venn at St. Peter’s, Hereford.104 “To us, in our childhood,” Venn wrote, “she was like a second mother” and the house at Hereford “a second home.”105

Throughout her long life, Emelia Venn was always “full of interest and cheerful humour,” which blended with, rather than set aside, her “strong Evangelical convictions.”106 Before settling with her brother at Hereford in 1830 she had traveled almost constantly, visiting the many friends and acquaintances she inherited from the Clapham days—the “Barings at Stratton, the Thorntons and Grants at Battersea Rise, the Wilberforces, Pearsons, Macaulays, and others”—besides her regular family meetings with the “Diceys at Claybrook, the Battens at Harrow, and the Stephens.”107 At the age of twenty-one, she had made a grand tour with the Diceys, in which she visited Waterloo a few weeks after the battle; passed Strasburg, which was then still under siege; and spent a month in Switzerland, where she climbed part of the Mont Blanc, and two weeks in Paris, where she saw Louis XVIII walking through the gardens of the Tuileries. “When we came to the place itself, the very spot on which the battle was fought,” she noted in her shorthand diary about the scene at the field of Waterloo in August 1815, “we got out of the carriage and walked”:

We walked for a long time without discovering anything to remind us that we were on a field of battle, except that every now and then the man pointed to a little rising in the ground and said “there 200 Englishmen are buried, “there so many Frenchmen lie”, “so many bodies are there”. . . . We next came to the farm of La Belle Alliance, where Bonaparte was directing the battle. . . . The guide brought us a very dirty white bed gown, and told us that was Bonaparte’s dressing-gown, that he had worn it when he was in that house, and had drawn it off in a very great hurry when he decamped.108

Until old age, Emelia Venn took great pleasure in traveling, especially to Italy. Some of Venn’s earliest memories were of her numerous collection of engravings and photographs of Rome, a city she loved despite her “hereditary horror of Popery.”109

Emelia Venn did what she could to provide the maternal influence after Martha Venn’s death. It was she who came up to London to select the children’s new governess, which was a difficult task in the days before schools for women’s higher (or what would today be called secondary) education, like Queen’s College, London, were opened, and it was she who took great care in choosing suitable books for them. Her arrival at the Highgate house was “always a bright and happy incident” in the Venn children’s life, but because she had to take care of her brother John Venn at Hereford, including the clergy wife’s share of the work at his large parish of St. Peter’s, she was unable to be with them “nearly so often or so long as she and we could have wished.”110

Early Education (1846–53)

Because he was much absorbed in his parish duties at St. John’s and gave more and more of his time to the CMS, Henry Venn limited himself to teaching his children religious lessons, leaving their general education to the governess. The daily house lessons were rather unruly—with Henrietta sitting on the mat outside the door, Henry standing on the balcony, Venn himself in the corner of the room in a similar but “more obvious disgrace,” and the dominant governess of their childhood, a “Miss Lemon,” in “solitary state” at the table in the middle of the room.111

Henry Venn, who himself had received a rather patchy home education from his own father, at one point decided that his sons should enjoy both home influence and school education. The governess regime was brought to an abrupt end when in November 1846 Venn and his brother were sent as day boys to Cholmondeley’s School, Highgate Hill, a free grammar school for boys from upper-middle-class homes of gentlemen, lawyers, clergy, and medics. Having been founded in 1562 by Roger Cholmondeley, president of St. John’s, Cambridge, the school was administered under a legal scheme in 1832, which ruled that some forty boys of neighboring towns were to be instructed in grammar, Latin, Greek, and Christian doctrine by the headmaster, an Oxbridge graduate and in Holy Orders.112 When Venn entered the school, the clerical headmaster was John Bradley Dyne, who was particularly acceptable to Henry Venn, as he was opposed to the anti-Evangelical Oxford movement.113 At Cholmondeley’s—in the midst of “the sound of the floggings heard overhead in the headmaster’s room,” the “fight of the boys” and their “filthy and blasphemous language”—Venn was not a high flyer, though he did win a prize for classics.114

Already in the autumn of 1847, Henry Venn concluded that the school was not a good one, and in the winter of that year and the spring of the next, his sons briefly received home education from a number of tutors. Around June 1848, when Venn was thirteen, the family made the “melancholy” move of two miles toward London, from 9 Hornsey Lane to 11 Highbury Crescent, to be nearer to the CMS headquarters on Salisbury Square and to bring the children closer to what Henry Venn hoped to be a better school.115 The new school, Islington Proprietary School, had strong Evangelical credentials: Daniel Wilson, the Evangelical vicar of Islington from 1824 to 1832, when he was consecrated bishop of Calcutta, stood at the head of its body of subscribers and proprietors. The Venns themselves apparently had an active interest in the school as in 1837 John Venn of Hereford was listed as a proprietor and Henry Venn as a director.116 There was even some anti-Romanist drilling included in the curriculum, probably in response to the “Papal Aggression” of 1851, which, Venn recalled, “threw the Protestant parts of England—and therefore above all the parish of Islington—into a temporary frenzy.”117 All pupils were for a short period kept in after schooltime to take notes of arguments against Roman Catholic doctrines. Because the partisan case presented was “so ridiculously simple” and “conclusive,” Venn, who around that time had never met either a High or a Broad Churchman, was greatly surprised when he found out later in the 1850s that Roman Catholics themselves could defend their position with plausible arguments.

Venn entered Islington Proprietary shortly after turning fourteen and would leave at the age of eighteen in the summer of 1853. At the school, he found himself among boys of much the same class as those at Highgate: sons of professionals and trading men in the City, with a “small sprinkling” of clergymen’s sons.118 There were some “superior and intelligent boys,” but not enough to “leaven the mass.”119 This second period of Venn’s school life was “neither joyous nor painful,” but “simply rather dreary and common place”—the teaching being of a “formal” and “unintelligent” kind, the attitude of the headmaster, Robert Wheler Bush, that of a “morbid and disappointed grudge” and anything like “school spirit” wholly lacking.120 During the first half of his six years at the school, Venn performed badly: he was idle, made “bad companions,” showed “no interest in any subject,” and remained in a low class even though the school’s standard of achievement was already “far from high.”121

On a summer day in 1850, Venn suddenly felt the impulse to spend an hour at home in doing algebra. Venn’s own account of this conversion-like experience is well worth quoting at full length:

I had been for several months painfully and slowly working at this subject, but it had never entered into my head, or into that of any boy or master, that anything was to be done at a lesson except in school hours. The impulse came as the whim of the moment, and seemed rather strange to me, I remember, even at the time, so as to seem to call for some sort of explanation to my younger brother. . . . It was in the holidays that this occurred, which, with the standard in vogue at school, made the occurrence the more astonishing. . . . I can remember the place I sat at in the dining room, and the spot from which I took down that volume of Colenso’s Algebra. I regard it as the first dawn of intellectual activity or interest, coming, as it did, at a time of life when most of those who ever do anything at college have already got several years of effective mental history behind them.122

Venn soon made considerable progress in mathematics, reading much further than the usual schoolboy.123 Like all other fair pupils at his school, however, Venn greatly suffered from the lack of motivation of the master and assistant master. The former, Harding, taught only Euclid, arithmetic, and elementary algebra, of which he “knew but little.”124 The latter, the Cambridge graduate Charles George Coombe, who taught mathematics to the two upper classes and under whose charge Venn was placed, never gave any help beyond the cursory instruction required during school hours.125 Venn’s early progress in mathematics was also hampered by the fact that he had no competitors to challenge him and that none of the older pupils showed any interest in the subject.126 His new scholarly zeal did leave its mark, however. Venn was moved to the upper classes, even spending the last year at Islington Proprietary in the top class together with, among others, Francis Jourdain and William Berkley, with whom he formed friendships that lasted into the 1890s.127 Now that he belonged to the select body in the school, Venn began to feel not so much a lack of general motivation as of informal encouragement and intellectual companionship. The upper boys were “not at all a bad set,” but they were too few in number to create the intellectual and moral environment that Venn believed “ought to exist in the head class of a good school.”128 A few more companions of the caliber of Jourdain and Berkley and an occasional invitation to the master’s house for “a little talk about College life and prospects” would have been enough for him to put Islington on par with its exemplars, King’s College School and the City of London School.

Venn strongly felt in retrospect that he would have done “incomparably better” at these large new day schools but again refused to blame his father for yet another lost opportunity: “His anxious watchfulness for all our interest was far too sincere for him not to have considered the matter; but it was a very difficult thing for one who was not inside scholastic circles to have known how to choose aright.”129

Early Informal Education

Next to the formal education Venn received between 1846 and 1853, first at Cholmondeley and later at Islington, which officially prepared him for entry to Cambridge, there was also what may be called his informal education. The daily house lessons of Miss Lemon in the years at Hornsey Lane had largely been for naught, but what did greatly impress and appealed to the young Venn’s mind were the practice-driven instructions from the children’s outdoor tutors. James Boston, the old gardener living in a wooden Noah’s ark–shaped cottage taught them everything about keeping the garden; Robert, the manservant, who had been brought up on the estate of Lady Olivia B. Sparrow, a well-known member of the Evangelical circle around Lady Huntingdon, provided them with much miscellaneous information about things they could not have acquired elsewhere: flora and fauna, cricket, climbing, carpentry, bird stuffing, and the use of the gun their father had bought in South Wales as an undergraduate.130

Over the years, Henry Venn spent a considerable amount of money on his children’s home education, and some of it on pursuits that were not then commonly appreciated. For example, there were drawing masters for art lessons, tutors for French and German, tools for gardening and carpentry, and equipment for wood carving.131 As in the case of formal school education, Henry Venn wished to give his children what he himself had lacked, such as being able to speak the language of the country when on a foreign tour. Notwithstanding his anxious watchfulness, his decisions again turned out to be unsuccessful, as they did not come at the right moment or in the right way, and none really caught on.132 For example, though Venn could speak and read French to a reasonable level before going to school in 1846, several years later he was unable to ask the simplest question or read the easiest book in French. And having started at Cambridge, Venn soon discovered that he had to begin from the beginning, “with the very letters,” of German.133 Once again, Venn was not among the fortunate ones, the small minority of “boys who get just the sort of youthful training which their later judgment will approve as being that which on the while made the most of their characters and capacities.”134 The young Venn did have two strong interests, neither of which was due either to his home or to his school education, and, like mathematics, neither of them ripened enough to grow. The first of these was for natural history, for collecting and observing insects, plants, and birds.135 Venn would later recall the excitement with which he first distinguished the notes of the yellowhammer and the green woodpecker found about Hereford and with which he succeeded in recognizing and naming the birds.136 The widespread presence of common birds at Highgate gave Venn plenty of practice, but because of an utter lack of encouragement and fitting opportunities his excitement was quickly smothered in the more urban neighborhood of Highbury. Venn’s second interest was in mechanics—an inheritance from his father and, especially, his grandfather.137 Throughout his entire life, John Venn of Clapham had had “strong mechanical and scientific tastes.”138 At Cambridge as a student, he had filled many notebooks with diagrams on optics, astronomy, hydrostatics, and mechanics; and as the spiritual leader of Clapham, he had experimented with a Dollond telescope, sextant, chronometer watch, and dividing compass—all much to the delight of his own father.139 Although for him Evangelicalism and science were not mutually exclusive, John Venn of Clapham saw a profound difference between them sub specie aeternitatis: “Alas! How little honour is it to be the best chemist in Europe in comparison with being a useful minister of Christ. What comparison can there be between saving a soul and analysing a salt!”140 Henry Venn, Venn’s father, often studied scientific theories about production methods for cotton and palm oil and tested scientific instruments such as telescopes and mercury and aneroid barometers with an eye to their possible missionary use in West Africa. “The first astronomical telescope through which I ever looked,” Venn would remember, “was one which had been bought [by the CMS] for Sierra Leone, and which had been sent up to his house for inspection.”141 Venn was encouraged in his keen taste for mechanics by his father, who often bought him tools. About the time that his oldest son was fifteen or sixteen, Henry Venn gave him an old-fashioned wooden turning lathe. Because of his strong manual aptitude, Venn was able to get much work and pleasure out of the instrument, but since no one was found to give him any instruction in the art of turning, his interest in it eventually petered out.

Both natural history and mechanics somehow appealed to Venn’s idiosyncrasies, which tended more to observation and skill than to the contemplation and sensibility needed for literature, poetry, history, or science, for which he showed no interest whatsoever. Each paled in comparison, however, to wild mountain scenery, his only really strong taste in childhood and his only source of “intense pleasure.”142 Henry Venn himself fostered a love for the mountains too, and he had taken his children to Wales several times before. But it was only in the summer of 1852, when the family spent some five weeks in Penmaenmawr, then a quiet, secluded, and unheard-of place on the north coast of Wales, that this passion really seized on Venn.143 After many joint excursions through the mountains standing above the sea west of the town, Venn embarked on a four- or five-mile hike that deeply impressed him: “It [extended] to the little lake which lies a few miles due south of Penmaenmaur, at the foot of Foel Fras. I had been told of this lake, and discovered it by aid of the Ordnance map. I remember now when I got to the top of the ridge from which I looked down and saw it; how I stood and shouted with delight.”144 Standing face to face with the Welsh mountains, the eighteen-year-old Venn had his first glimmering awareness of the overwhelming sublimity of nature as well as of the existence of his own inner self.145 The hike itself was not impressive, but the very fact that it was the first mountain ramble that Venn took by himself, indeed, made all the difference to him.146 Though perhaps more cheerful, self-conscious, and earthly, Venn’s experience of human solitude and natural grandeur made a spiritual impression on him that showed a striking resemblance to his forefathers’ conversion moments. When the family went to the Isle of Wight for part of September 1853, Venn again embarked on a long, solitary walk that clearly expressed both his early sympathies and training and his wish to be religious; he made a “devout pilgrimage” to the grave of Elizabeth Wallbridge, the main character of a then well-known Evangelical booklet, The Dairyman’s Daughter (1814), in Arreton.147

There Venn was, one month before entering Cambridge: an “unsophisticated” nineteen-year-old Evangelical clergyman’s son without an elaborate “mental history” or a special aptitude for any academic pursuit, but with the spark of scholarly excitement and the promise of intellectual companionship enthusing him.148

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During Venn’s childhood and youth the first building blocks of his religious identity were laid: a set of positive yet serious Evangelical values firmly centered around duty, the saintly example of his awe-inspiring father, and a small social circle of family and religious connections. Each of these was embedded in an Evangelical domestic ideal of divinely ordained family relationships and the home as a center of worship, and reinforced by a sense of the Venn family’s history and tradition, as recorded in its extensive archives.

After the early death of Martha Venn, Henry Venn’s worldly duty outside the home started to conflict more and more with his familial duty regarding his children. However, Henry Venn remained the single most important element in Venn’s early religious development. An influence that rested on personal example rather than on doctrinal learning, the strength of his personality may, indeed, have “woven a weak thread into the garment of Venn’s Evangelicalism” as he embodied an unattainable ideal for his oldest son, who felt too inferior to seek paternal guidance in light of any religious doubts and difficulties.149 Another crucial element in this regard was the religious narrowness of Venn’s upbringing, with Evangelicalism being the only brand of Christianity with which he was ever acquainted by his father. “To me, who wished to be religious,” wrote Venn when looking back on the period of his matriculation at Cambridge, “the Evangelical creed seemed the only one in the field.”

Regret about lost opportunities, both religiously and intellectually, was to be the main theme in Venn’s autobiographical reminiscences of his childhood. Venn regretted the absence of counterbalancing religious viewpoints and role models and lamented the utter lack of intellectual encouragement and personal involvement from the teachers at school. Characteristically, the valuable exceptions—his discovery of his interest in mathematics, of his need for bright companions, and of his love of flora and fauna—took place informally and rather haphazardly.

These considerations provide the background against which to understand Venn’s exposure, both as a student at Cambridge and as a curate in country parishes, to a broader spectrum of thought, which propelled the next stage in his religious and intellectual development.

2

Student

(1853–57)

The Venn family was an example par excellence of the fact that academic education in Britain had always been to a considerable extent influenced by “family sympathy and tradition” and that generation after generation often resorted to the same university and even to the same college, the occasional breaches of continuity being “sometimes due to the local accident of some school or county providing a scholarship at some particular College.”1 When Venn was admitted to Gonville and Caius College on 25 June 1853, and matriculated at Cambridge in October of that same year, he represented the eighth generation of Venns to enter university and the fifth generation of Cantabrigian Venns, the earlier stream of Oxfordians having been diverted owing to the scholarship at Tiverton, Devon, in 1709.2 Given his ancestry, Venn was destined for Cambridge as much as he was for Gonville and Caius College, then the “Evangelical College in popular estimate.”3 Caius’s reputation as the Evangelical college in Cambridge had been passed from Magdalene College under Samuel Hey at the start of the nineteenth century to Queens’ College under Isaac Milner up to the 1820s and subsequently to Trinity College, when William Carus was senior dean. Caius acquired the reputation in the 1840s and 1850s because of the tutorship, between 1848 and 1865, of Charles Clayton, the vicar of Holy Trinity and the acknowledged successor of Simeon in the leadership of the Evangelical party at Cambridge.4 Venn himself would play an important part in sustaining this reputation on the historical record, as his recollections of his student days were used as evidence of the religious state of mid-nineteenth Cambridge in its official history.5 For Henry Venn, Caius was the obvious choice for his eldest son, by virtue of both public reputation and personal acquaintance. Clayton, who was at the center of a broader Evangelical network connecting church and university through his recommendations of suitable university men for parishes around the country, often contacted Henry Venn to pass on the names of young men interested in missionary work.6

From the time of his matriculation on, the college would be a constant element in Venn’s religious and academic identity: he would remain a member of Caius for nearly seventy years, as a student and fellow, as clergyman and layman. Any examination of Venn’s life should therefore take into consideration the institutional backdrop against which his change of religious perspective and choice for an academic career took place. This chapter covers the period of his studentship, which began with his entry into Caius, a highly symbolical moment in being both a continuation of family tradition and, more importantly, the very first source of influence outside his family environment, providing an opportunity to broaden the social, religious, and intellectual views and positions to which Venn was exposed.

Venn’s well-documented undergraduate experience at Cambridge also offers a valuable personal perspective from which to view different aspects of the broader theme of university reform in the second half of the nineteenth century: in particular, the changing continuum of religious participation, stretching from institutional requirements to personal observance, the nature and “drying out” of the Evangelical reputation of Caius, the weakening of the linkage between academic and clerical expectations, and the professionalization of teaching and learning. Venn’s student life described in this chapter sets the scene for the reforms that would shape and were shaped by his own later academic life, to be explored in future chapters.

Undergraduate Years (1853–57)

An Evangelical Pensioner (1853–54)

Some of Venn’s friends at Islington Proprietary had won open scholarships at Oxford colleges a few months before they left school.7 Because this system was not introduced in Cambridge until the late 1850s and early 1860s, Venn himself was in the unfortunate position of “the boy destined for Cambridge” who found that he had to wait for a scholarship until he had been at college for nearly a year.8 Consequently, he spent his entire freshman year as a pensioner living in rooms above a furniture shop in Peas Hill, the market where Mr. Clayton, the brother of the tutor of Caius, sold his fish.

Venn’s undergraduate life was on the whole “somewhat rude and severe.”9 Caius itself was neither attractive looking nor in a very satisfactory state, “without water laid on or adequate provision for heating.”10 The frontage toward Trinity Street was by no means impressive, and the Perse and Legge buildings inside Tree Court had already been deprived, some fifty years earlier, of the picturesqueness they once possessed.11 The master, Edwin Guest, took little or no part in university matters, the president did little but “sleep and fish,” and with Clayton, the tutor who never lectured, students had contact only for a few minutes at the beginning and end of term.12 Venn’s daily habits, in his first year, were simple and largely determined by the sixteenth-century statutes of Dr. Caius, which were still in force in the early 1850s.13 Venn went out early in the morning to bathe on Sheep’s Green, had eggs and cold bacon for breakfast, went to morning chapel at 7:45, and attended lectures until lunch—a meal that consisted of nothing more than “going to the cupboard and cutting some bread and cheese, with the addition at most of a glass of beer.”14 After the regular afternoon walk, Venn dined in the Old Hall without formal garb at four, an hour that not only hindered any attempt at supper or five o’clock tea, but was also hostile to the planning of the butcher, the dinner consisting merely of joints, potatoes, and cabbage if sweets and cheese had not been specially preordered.15 For the “church-going, sermon-attending folk” to which Venn belonged there followed Caius College’s chapel around 5:30 on weekdays; on Sundays, dressed in cap and gown, he went to College Chapel at six, which gave him just enough time to listen to Clayton’s sermon at Holy Trinity Church.16 There was a pause around eight or nine o’clock for tea and talk on weekdays, with evening conversations in college often continuing until midnight.

At Caius, thirty-three students were admitted in the same year as Venn, 1852–53.17 Like Venn, many of them were from clerical backgrounds and had clerical aspirations of their own: “A decided majority of us—in our College at least—contemplated taking orders, or had come to College with that hope on the part of our parents. Nearly half of us were the sons of clergymen.”18 A generation or two before Venn’s, the Evangelicals at Cambridge had been few, scattered at various colleges, especially Magdalene and Queens’, and somewhat in the position of a “persecuted party.”19 By the time of the early 1850s, the Evangelicals had become numerous, and so far as Caius was concerned, “almost aggressive.”20 The strong sense of identity within the Evangelical party at Caius—a reflection of a radicalized midcentury Evangelicalism united against the Roman Catholic enemy—polarized the college: “Most of the men with any religious feeling joined this party; by natural reaction the opposite party gathered in its ranks all that was idle and noisy. The result was that the College was split into two distinct camps . . . which had little communication with each other.”21 Notwithstanding the diversity of religious opinion and churchmanship at Caius in the 1850s and Clayton’s own moderate Evangelicalism, Venn’s undergraduate experience of collegiate religion was that of the strict and partisan nature of public allegiance to Evangelicalism. Despite the stark contrast in which it stood to the positive and experiential religion of his youth, for Venn, who wished to be religious and for who the Evangelical creed seemed the only one available, it was obvious to throw in his lot with the “rigid” camp of “narrow-minded” Evangelical students who kept entirely to themselves.22 At least during the first one or two terms of his first year at Caius, Venn attended their prayer meetings, followed them in holding aloof from almost every form of social amusement, regularly took afternoon walks with some of them, particularly the slightly older extreme Calvinist Charles Renshaw Ord, and kept but one book on his shelves: his great-grandfather’s The Complete Duty of Man.23 Together with several other undergraduates of his college, Venn not only attended Clayton’s preaching after evening chapel on Sundays but also joined his breakfast parties and coffee or tea parties after hall, where the pièce de résistance was usually an Evangelical missionary, recently returned from India or China.24 Given the responsibilities as vicar, tutor, and center of a broad Evangelical network, Clayton did not have the time to get to know any of the Caian undergraduates individually. Venn would defend him publicly, but privately he dismissed Clayton’s meetings and parties as neither “cheerful” nor “profitable” and expressed his disappointment that a man of his position of influence did so little to guide those of his pupils who intended to take Holy Orders.25 Venn also became quickly dissatisfied with Clayton’s presentation of Evangelicalism, describing his sermons as “platitudes,” yet, though he felt drawn toward the “originality” and “power” of the preaching of Harvey Goodwin, a High Churchman, conscience told him that Clayton was “the right man.”26

Because he did not belong to either the boat and cricket club or the musical society and lived alone in lodgings rather than in college rooms, Venn’s circle of friends was initially limited to the members of the Evangelical camp in his own year. Venn was aware that there were less rigidly orthodox students at Cambridge, open to religious inquiry and skepticism, some of whom were Caians who had studied under F. D. Maurice, the controversial Anglican theologian, and Venn’s future colleague, at King’s College, London. But they were “not at all influential men in the College, nor in any degree personal friends.”27 Venn’s undergraduate life as one of the average quiet reading men took place in the sheltered environment of college, where his membership of the rigid party of Evangelicals was defined in a number of ways: in part positively, through regular attendance at sermons and meetings with their Evangelical leader, and in part negatively, by avoiding communication with the ungodly students and shunning certain churches and religious views as heterodox.

For Venn, Evangelicalism was not merely a matter of his personal adherence to the Evangelical camp in his college. The Venns being “of the very blue blood of the party,” it was also very much a label attached to him by virtue of ancestry and public association, resulting from his father’s and uncle’s association with Evangelicalism in the pulpit and via the CMS and the Christian Observer.28 From the beginning of the first year, Venn’s inherited Evangelical beliefs were supplemented with inherited Evangelical contacts, as several of the seniors in the college called on him at Clayton’s instigation or for his name’s sake.29 H. T. Francis, a fellow student of Venn who became a lifelong friend, would attest to the social weight of the Venn family name in a telling anecdote about one of Clayton’s breakfast parties:

His butler would go round and distribute haphazard invitations—they partook rather of the nature of an order than an invitation—to some twenty or more men. . . . [We] would be separately introduced to [the] chief guest, with a reference to [any] Evangelical progenitors or relations. Such as Mr So and So, son of the Author of Village Sermons or as connected with some leading light of the Low Church party. . . . When my turn came, having no Evangelical connexions to boast of, I feared that, like the man without a wedding garment, I might be rejected, but after some humming and hawing Clayton was struck with a happy thought and I was announced as “A friend of Mr John Venn,” and allowed to pass.30

During his youth, his father had been the summum of Evangelicalism personified. At Caius in his first year, Venn encountered for the very first time Evangelicals he did not admire and who were reproachable to him insofar as they did not measure up to the familial and paternal example. Unlike his uncle John Venn of Hereford, who in his Cambridge days had associated with Simeon “from grounds of hereditary friendship, as well as community of sentiment,” Venn’s hereditary association with Clayton and Evangelical undergraduates like Ord, who would later offer himself to Henry Venn as a CMS missionary, only led him to experience a distance between their Evangelicalism and the Evangelicalism that he held to be his own.31 Venn himself unfavorably contrasted the rigid, narrow, and inward-looking orientation of the Evangelical party at Caius with the more moderate, pragmatic, and outward-looking character of the older strand of Claphamite Evangelicalism represented by his family.32 Venn wrote, for example:

My main associate [Ord] was so narrow and determined in his views that I doubt if I should have got on with him as long as I did, but for his one indulgence,—chess—, in games of which I used to spend one evening in the week with him.

Several . . . of the seniors in the College called on me . . . but after the first term or two they hardly found me in sufficient sympathy with them to keep up any intimacy.33

Whereas the strict Calvinist Evangelicals at Caius sought to “hold themselves apart from the amusements of a sinful world,” the Claphamite mission, of which Venn was reminded in the weekly letters from his father, in which he wrote about his work for the CMS, was precisely to engage with that world.34 For moderate Calvinists like his father, certain leisure and amusements were permitted and the duty of Christian service included a this-worldly missionary zeal, encompassing the organization of missions to India and African commerce. The differences were not only theological but also social. The Evangelicalism of Venn’s upbringing was nurtured in the sober yet comfortable environment of middle-class families engaging in leisure and amusements and, indeed, “tempered by the assurance of salvation” passed down over three generations of Venn Evangelicals.35 Henry Venn could afford to work for the CMS without drawing a salary while also sending his son to Cambridge as a pensioner and continuing to allow him a fair amount of money for books, charitable giving, and travels. Hence, Venn did not have much in common with those who had given up business in order to return to university with an eye to taking Holy Orders.36

Already after a few months into his first year, Venn’s circle came to consist of at least three “saving elements”: his cousin Henry Babington, John E. Whiting, and James P. Garrick. Babington, who was a year Venn’s senior, stood so entirely “outside the pious world of the University” that but for their family relationship they would never have become friends.37 Being of Claphamite descent, Babington did much to keep Venn on what he himself would later consider the right religious path. Where Whiting belonged to the small body of “intermediaries” between the religious camp and all the others, Garrick, who became Venn’s most intimate friend after the second or third term, also began with the Evangelicals in college, but, like Venn, soon “drifted somewhat away from their path.”38 Because of the lack of suitable alternatives to the activities of the “idle and noisy” crowd in the university, Venn and his small group of friends limited themselves to occasional boating, some mild cricket in spring, and, especially, daily walks.39

We took our exercise on the high roads. We had at least the sense not to walk alone, and accordingly the country for miles round Cambridge every afternoon was sprinkled over with couples of men. Monotonous and tame as such a pursuit may seem . . . , it had one recommendation, in the opportunities it gave for conversation with selected friends. . . . Sunday,—no one, I believe, ever “worked” on that day—, was especially devoted to such walks, by the quiet and reading men more especially, none but the somewhat extreme having any objection to such an employment of the day. We came out of chapel soon after ten, and Hall was at four, and the whole interval between was sometimes spend expended in this way. I suppose there is scarcely a single village, within 10 miles of Cambridge with which I have not made acquaintance on such walks.40

Venn’s new friends, though not narrow or rigid Evangelicals, were still largely orthodox men. Where William Wilberforce Gedge, who was of impeccable Evangelical pedigree, would offer himself as a missionary, others, like Garrick and Joseph Gould, would pursue a conventional career as parish clergymen with college livings. Much to the delight of his own father, Venn conducted private prayers and Bible study with Garrick and through his friendship with D. B. Panton extended a connection begun in the previous generation.41 At the same time, however, it was to his conversations with intimate friends like Garrick that Venn owed the very first steps in the broadening of his intellectual horizon, to be described in the next chapter.

A Perse Scholar (1854–55)

Venn entered a university that in the first half of the nineteenth century had increasingly been criticized, from within and without, for the narrowness of its curriculum and its distribution of wealth. Until 1850, when the Classical Tripos, instituted in 1822, was added as an option, the Mathematical Tripos—long seen as the only true foundation of a liberal education—was the sole honors examination that led to a BA degree. Also, financial rewards of college fellowships were bestowed purely on the basis of tripos success, without any further obligation than the taking of Holy Orders and remaining unmarried. During his time as a Caian student in the mid-1850s, Venn personally experienced the force of these and other key features of a largely unreformed Cambridge.

Venn’s first year at Caius had consisted of regular lectures in classics and mathematics, which took place every day from nine to eleven, and two examinations: the classical examination, at the end of the Lent term, and the mathematical examination (“Mays”), at the end of the Easter term. Given that the assignment of scholarships was entirely based on the joint result of these two examinations, they were “a very important affair.”42 “So far, good,” but there were at least three features in the university system of his day that Venn considered “odd.”43 Firstly, with the intercollegiate system still unknown, all students were dependent on their own college for their official instruction in classics and mathematics, the “only two goals for the Honour man.”44 The lecturers at Caius were competent in these so-called permanent studies, but outside this range “all was a blank.”45 For example, where theology was represented by “a good-natured mathematician—his good nature being the cause of his accepting a post declined by his colleagues”—what went by the name of natural science consisted of “a small table being brought into the Arts School three times a week.”46 Secondly, as to the regular lectures, for the first year and a half there was “no selection or discrimination whatever”:

we all sat side by side, listening—or not listening, as the case may be—to the same exposition. . . . The brilliant scholar from the best public schools, and the young man who had given up business and was beginning his Greek letters with a view to taking Orders; the destined high wrangler, who had read his conic sections as a schoolboy, and the youth to whom Euclid and his mysterious pictures were a daily puzzle, sat side by side on the benches of the lecture room.47

Thirdly, insofar as these lectures kept strictly to their official hours, the prevailing system forced every student, or at least every serious academic (or “reading”) man, to resort to a private tutor or “coach” whose job was exclusively to prepare his pupils for the tripos.48 Venn initially did not have a coach but soon after the first term started to attend the classes of William Hopkins, the famous “wrangler maker” who greatly influenced and for some time dominated the teaching of mathematics in Cambridge.49 Notwithstanding Hopkins’s reputation and success, his method of tuition—well adapted to and duly praised by famous pupils like Arthur Cayley, James Clerk Maxwell, and Francis Galton—suited neither Venn’s “naturally inquisitive” spirit nor his need of “individual attention and discussion”:

We went to him every day—, and he used to take us altogether, in one class for each year. . . . What I wanted was someone who would talk out every subject with me, attend to my doubts,—often involving speculative points which did not lie quite in the usual curriculum—, and especially in a novel branch like Differential Calculus, be prepared to explain what it all meant, and was intended to lead to. . . . As so many eminent men have declared that they owed very much to Hopkins’ methods of tuition, the fault must have been partly mine; but, as it was, I cannot recall any new or stimulating idea which I owed to him, or any solution of a real difficulty.50

Much to his own surprise, Venn came out seventh in the classical examination and at the top of the list of the mathematical examination in his college. This result earned him an election to a Perse scholarship at the end of his freshman year and entitled him, upon his return in October 1854, to rent-free rooms in the Perse building.51

The Perse building had been built in 1617–18 and would remain practically unaltered, apart from minor improvements and changes to its external appearance, for two and a half centuries. As in the case of all old college buildings, it originally provided no separate sleeping apartments, and the bedroom was an afterthought. Whereas in other buildings a sleeping place had often been created by partitioning part of the sitting room with a lath and plaster partition, Venn slept in the attic, two floors above the sitting room, with no fireplace and only a small window to the north under the sloping roof.52 After suffering from a light attack of smallpox at the end of the first term, in December Venn spent the harsh “Crimean winter” in this attic, where “for a month or more . . . the jug was frozen from top to bottom and my sponge resembled a brick.”53 Despite the hardships, Venn greatly enjoyed the move from his lonely lodgings in Peas Hill to the Perse building on the grounds of Caius College and finally began “to get any appreciable good out of College life”; he gradually overcame his shyness and not only made a few more friends but also started to free himself from the Evangelical camp.54

The first hurdle that Venn had to cross to achieve a Cambridge degree was the previous examination, or “Little-Go”—a kind of preliminary examination, intended to establish a basic standard in mathematics and classics, which took place at the end of the fifth term.55 The subjects of the previous examination were “few and easy”—one of the Gospels in Greek, a Latin and Greek classic, William Paley’s Evidences of Christianity, the first three books of Euclid and arithmetic—and Caians had the benefit of an “exceptionally good” college teacher in mathematics, Norman Macleod Ferrers, who would later become master.56 Between October and April, Venn prepared for the previous examination by attending the daily lectures and by working hard on mathematics with Francis Jameson, his new private tutor.57 Jameson assisted Venn in once again coming out first in mathematics, a result that earned him a promotion to a scholarship of higher value, albeit without rooms. Even though Jameson represented the “opposite extreme” to Hopkins, the new private tutor was not a success altogether, as Jameson had “neither the power nor the originality that was desirable.”58 After Easter term, Venn made two changes: he moved to rooms on the second floor of Barraclough’s building on King’s Parade, and he settled with Isaac Todhunter as his mathematical coach.59 Todhunter, himself a former pupil of Augustus De Morgan and William Hopkins, became a famous mathematical lecturer, coach, and author of a large number of textbooks apparently written “in momentary interstices of time, between one pupil’s entering his sanctum and another leaving it.”60 As a coach, Todhunter was “very industrious and systematic,” but Venn strongly felt that his studies

so far as concerns the intellectual and educational profit which is to be made out of mathematics, would have been far more advantageous with a teacher of another stamp. [Todhunter] always had the Tripos prominently in view, and seemed to have no sympathy with those who wished to turn aside to study some detached point which interested them or to speculate about the logical and philosophical problems that arose in the way. I suppose he considered it his duty to prepare us, to the utmost, for our impending examination, for, as I afterwards came to know, he really possessed wide knowledge in other directions, and some speculative taste.61

Like all who belonged to the minority of reading men preparing for the tripos, Venn relied on coaching rather than college or university teaching to achieve success in the “one great examination.”62 During his last undergraduate year, leading up to his sixth wranglership, he would grow increasingly exhausted, mentally and even physically, with this aspect of the university framework.63

Sixth Wranglership and Its Aftermath (1855–58)

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the normal route to a BA degree at Cambridge was through the Senate House examination, a mathematical test instituted in the middle of the eighteenth century.64 After the Classical Tripos was founded, the Senate House examination became known as the Mathematical Tripos so as to differentiate it from the new examination in classics. From the 1820s—when the term “Mathematical Tripos” was first introduced—until about 1858, the undisguised pretense was that the examination for an ordinary (“poll”) degree was also part of the Senate House examination, whereas the former had, in fact, already been separated from the latter in 1827.65

The establishment of the Classical Tripos had broadened the curriculum while preserving the predominance of mathematics; where the previous examination, given to all second-year students, tested knowledge of the classics in such a way that it would not hinder the pursuit of mathematics, in order to compete in the Classical Tripos students first had to obtain an honors degree in the original tripos.66 Somewhat similarly, the establishment of the Moral Sciences and Natural Sciences Triposes (in 1848) challenged the traditional status of mathematics as “the core of the liberal education that was Cambridge’s raison d’être,” but it did not put an end to it; while these triposes allowed students to earn an honors degree without first obtaining honors in mathematics, even after 1851 students could compete in the three nonmathematical triposes only after passing the partly mathematical “ordinary” degree.67 At any rate, Venn could still write that he was “following the routine” by devoting himself to the “exclusive study of mathematics” in the years between his matriculation in October 1853 and his examination in January 1857.68

Shortly after Venn’s move to Todhunter, around May or June 1855, his great friend Garrick had to leave Cambridge for a year owing to an attack of inflammation of the eyes, whereby Venn lost not only his companionship but also the help of his rivalry in mathematics.69 There were no mathematical equals at Caius, and, as a result, Venn “got rather more slack” than he had previously been.70 Besides occasional trips to Switzerland (September 1855), Wales (May 1856), and Paris (September 1856), as a reader for the tripos Venn kept “pretty steadily at work” in the long vacations and the October terms.71 After three and a half years spent almost entirely in preparation for the tripos examination, Venn used the last “unpleasant” months of 1856 for “gathering up the remains left unfinished, doing papers systematically, and making sure of the weak and uncertain points.”72

Since 1848 the Senate House examination consisted of two parts: one three-day period and one five-day period. All candidates for an honors BA degree, as distinct from an ordinary BA degree, took the three-day examination in elementary mathematics. Those who performed well and qualified for honors then took the five-day examination in higher mathematical subjects. When Venn made the Senate House examination in January 1857, the first three-day period, from Tuesday the sixth until Thursday the eighth, consisted of a three-hour morning and afternoon session of so-called problem papers set by the moderators, in his case William M. Campion and William Walton.73 As Venn informed his father in a short letter written on Thursday 6 January he was “very glad” that the first three days had come to an end, “though I have not done so well as I expected on the whole”: “on Tuesday morning we had Euclid & conic sections in which paper I got on tolerably well, but made a mess of the Algebra & Trigonometry in the afternoon. On Wednesday morning we did the Statics & Dynamics in which I got on moderately well, but again made a mess of the afternoon paper on Hydrostatics & Optics.”74 Venn, however, achieved well enough to proceed to the five-day period for honors candidates, which started on Monday the nineteenth and ended on Friday the twenty-third of January. Following the various changes through which Cambridge mathematical education had gone in the first half of the nineteenth century, this second and more advanced part of the examination emphasized, alongside calculus and geometry, the study of “Mixed Mathematics,” including hydrodynamics, astronomy and the theory of gravitation, and geometrical and physical optics.75

After some twenty-seven hours of solving 113 problems with pen, ink, and paper in a cold Senate House, Venn finished sixth wrangler, that is, sixth in the list of first-class honors, bracketed with a student of Queens’ College.76 “I think this was about my right place, as things were,” Venn concluded, adding that it was “no loss” that he had not begun with the celebrated E. J. Routh, under whose tuition he would probably have done better.77 What Venn did experience as a loss was that the almost-customary carelessness with which students chose their coaches had prevented him from coaching with Percival Frost, the private tutor who stimulated “a more intelligent and philosophical grasp of mathematics” and who preferred the old custom of taking reading parties of students during the long vacation.78 More generally, Venn felt that at least in his year “more intense application, or more suitable coaching” might have brought out any of the first ten wranglers at the top of the list.79

The three and a half years of preparation for the Mathematical Tripos—ten terms of cultivating the mechanical ability to solve mathematical problems as rapidly as possible—was followed by a strong reaction. Before coming up to Cambridge and for his first two years in college he had had “a real enjoyment in the subject,” but after eight days in the Senate House Venn felt “almost a repulsion towards it” and in a fit of disgust sold nearly all his mathematical books.80 Venn did not compete for the Smith’s Prize, he never made any further study of higher mathematics, and he even lost part of what he had acquired during his student years.81 Many decades later, when he was already working on algebraic logic, Venn would confess that he had made a “great mistake,” feeling that he should have retained and utilized the knowledge in other directions.82

After his graduation, Venn resided at Caius for the following two terms, taking one or two mathematical pupils “but not enough of them, fortunately, to occupy more than a very little time in the day.”83 This left him free to take lessons in German and Italian in preparation for a summer tour on the Continent and to continue study, seeking to address what he perceived as a lack in his general education. At Easter 1857, Venn, aged twenty-three, was elected to a junior fellowship, an old-fashioned “pension for work [well] done” that allowed him to move from the bachelors’ table in hall to that of the fellows.84 The “old days of coarseness and drinking” were over and, with them, the “not unfrequent eccentricity,” but the new habits of “speculative activity” and of “professional industry” to which he would come to contribute in later decades had not yet penetrated into college.85 What remained was the dull and unlively conversation of the “fairly well educated” resident body.86 None of the fellows being of “special geniality” or “personal influence of any kind,” Venn decided to leave Cambridge at the end of 1858.87

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Venn was very much the successful product of the unreformed university, or what he himself sometimes termed the old university system. Like so many young men before him, he was trained in the liberal English educational tradition of the Mathematical Tripos and came up to Cambridge as the son of a clergyman who expected to take Holy Orders and to have his fellowship lead on to a clerical career at a college living.

What follows will explore Venn’s realization of his clerical ambition followed by his decision to become a teaching academic at his alma mater. From a personal perspective, this transition from one family tradition—the clerical—to another—the academic—went hand in hand with the start of his departure from the third—the religious or Evangelical. Venn’s Evangelicalism would for many years to come remain firmly in place, but as he came into contact with new ideas that he discussed with friends of his own choosing, he became aware of the disparity between public practice and private discussion and the tension between clerical duty and intellectual honesty. These aspects of Venn’s personal development in the period between the late 1850s and 1870s will be placed in the broader context of changing academic and religious roles of the college and university. What emerges is a picture of Venn as part of a transitional midcentury generation whose career development mirrored the gradual reform of university in which they, like Venn, often played an active role. At a later stage, Venn’s experience in these years provides a background against which to contrast the post-Darwinian search to pursue religion, at the individual and collegiate level, while trying to build a scientific view of the nearer world.

3

Curate

(1857–62)

During his undergraduate years, Venn’s Evangelical sympathies, cultivated within the family home and anchored by the awe and reverence he felt toward his father, remained firmly in place. Rather than offering new saints that either strengthened or threatened his hereditary Evangelicalism, college life at Caius had provided a new sphere of Evangelical association the rigidity and narrowness of which did little else than to reaffirm sentiments already in place. At the end of the 1850s, Venn still belonged to the Evangelical party even though he had by that time made other friends outside their ranks, with whom he spent most of his time.1 Venn’s Evangelicalism around that time was traditional in that the belief of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather held full sway with him; Venn was a nominal Evangelical in that his faith was inspired almost entirely by emotional attachment and the wish to live up to the expectations of one who bore the Venn name.2

Following his graduation in 1857, Venn prepared for Holy Orders and took several livings as an Evangelical curate. This was a short period in which he publicly followed the Venn family tradition. Nonetheless, he would later look back highly critically on the adequacy of his training for this role as well as on the personal example of the Evangelical clergymen under whom he served. The first part of this chapter discusses Venn’s retrospective observations of his clerical preparation and experiences in light of familial expectations and paternal influence.

What college had offered Venn, in terms of personal development, was a potential source of contact with a broader range of religious influences and the start of an academic training that, as his own father put it, was aimed at the cultivation of “a habit of perfect accuracy.”3 It was only as a curate that Venn started to examine whether his Evangelicalism was a hereditary system adopted from habit or a creed acceptable on the basis of honest conviction.4 This process was set in motion by a combination of factors: to wit, his hard-won competence in critical analysis and exact reasoning and his intercourse with a circle of friends that he had acquired on his own account. Together, these opened Venn to new ideas and texts that he felt able to discuss freely and which, as such, represented a starting point for his future academic studies and laid the basis of his eventual move away from Evangelicalism. The second part of this chapter describes the conflict that emerged between Venn’s public and private religious position and the ways his reading and discussion of new ideas informed his growing theological divergence from certain core Evangelical tenets. This departure from Evangelicalism will be related to, and contrasted with, the notion of a broader crisis of faith and vocation in Venn’s generation, with an eye to capturing the nature of the change that took place in his private religious views.

Evangelical Clerical Heir (1858–59)

Before the storm that swept its way through the whole of Victorian Britain following the publication of Essays and Reviews (1860)—the book that sparked a crisis of faith contemporary with that provoked by Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) but one more central to the religious mind—Cambridge had for centuries been a bastion of Anglican orthodoxy.5 After several decades of internal attempts at university reform and the appointment of a parliamentary commission (1855) that was to implement the external recommendations of the first royal commission (1850–52), the 1850s saw the first statutory changes that would be canonized, in the case of Caius, in the statutes of 1860.6 As a result of the passing of the Cambridge University Act on 29 July 1856, about the same time that he ranked sixth wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos, Venn was one of a new generation not to have a religious test on graduation.

Despite these and other reforms that to reactionary dons seemed to subvert the close connection between the Church of England and Oxbridge and, thereby, tantamount to disestablishment and secularization, Cambridge retained the character of a seminary until well after 1850. When Venn was elected to a junior fellowship in 1858, for example, he was required to declare himself a bona fide member of the Church of England and expected to take orders within a number of years of election. Although clerical numbers were on the point of declining, of the twenty-three fellows elected in the 1850s, seventeen were ordained, ten of whom went on to hold college livings.7 Caius around that time was also still very much a sheltered environment free from worldly influences. Even though already “in vogue in the big cities,” atheism still “went in its shirt-sleeves and corduroys, and smoked coarse tobacco” and had not yet reached the “cigars and dress-suits” of the colleges.8 Like the majority of his fellow Caian students, as an undergraduate Venn was a rather unsuspecting clergyman’s son who knew of the existence of infidels not even through newspapers or novels but only through their “occasional demolition in orthodox polemical works.”9 At least until the early 1860s, Venn’s sincere belief was that infidelity was, in actual fact, “confined to the French” and to the “wicked” among his countrymen.10

Like so many of his contemporaries, Venn had not accepted his junior fellowship with the view of making it a lifelong post; instead, he wished to take orders and to take to a country pulpit as an Evangelical curate.11 Henry Venn, in his weekly letters, repeatedly expressed the hope that his son would make his talents and his newly formed Cambridge habit of “doing everything thoroughly” fully available “for the Lord’s service [in whatever] departments He may call,” writing that to him a wranglership or fellowship was nothing more than a “second consideration.”12 A letter dated 20 February 1858 was written by Henry Venn only to let his son know how much it comforted him to know “that the great works in which I am engaged will go on just as well without me & that my sons are qualified to [carry] on the works if the Lord calls them to it.”13 Two years earlier, in 1856, Venn had promised himself to fulfill the expectations of the heir of an Evangelical dynasty and son of the honorary secretary to the CMS in reaction to a remarkable display of his public Evangelical credentials.

I was having tea with a friend [and] talking about our prospects, when he asked me if I had seen a sort of prophecy or estimate of the chances of the leading men. As soon as I left his rooms I went to the Union to the see the paper. I found the notice there,—one in the style of the “tips” published before a horse-race,—wherein my name was mentioned, after ten or twelve others, with a rather contemptuous remark that it was only referred to in consequence of my claims [for the tripos] being pressed by the Evangelicals.14

Venn was greatly disturbed by the forecast, and his instant and natural reaction was to vow that if he secured a good place in the tripos he would become a missionary. He never took the step to become an Evangelical missionary, though it was not for many years that he ceased to “regard the resolution of a clerical as really binding.”15 For Venn, there was not yet a clear distinction between a personal calling and living up to hereditary expectation: he never for one moment doubted whether he should take Holy Orders and become an Evangelical clergyman.16

Holy Orders

After a summer spent at Penmaenmawr, Wales, with his father, brother and sister, his aunt Jane Venn, and cousin Caroline Stephen, Venn returned to Cambridge at the end of the long vacation in 1858 to begin his preparation for Holy Orders. During the whole of September, he had the college to himself, working hard all day, feasting on partridges in solitary state at the fellows’ table in the evening and catching a glimpse of the comet Donati late at night.

Cambridge had at that point not yet developed courses to prepare young men for the clerical life so many were to lead. There existed no first degree in divinity equivalent to the BA, and the bachelor of divinity was a postgraduate qualification to be taken by MAs at least fourteen years after their matriculation.17 With the ideal of a broad liberal education still firmly in place to safeguard against specialist training, Venn’s formal theological education as an undergraduate had consisted merely of the previous examination or “Little-Go,” which included an examination on Paley’s Evidences on Christianity and on one of the Gospels or the Acts of the Apostles in Greek.18 In lieu of university lecturers, a species that had yet to come into existence, the limited amount of theological teaching for the Little-Go was offered by college lecturers whose standards reminded Venn of “being distinctly set back towards school-boyhood.”19

The first hurdle that Venn had to clear was the “Voluntary Theological Examination,” the only available university test in theology in the early Victorian system. Established in 1842 to satisfy those who argued that the clergy needed more specialist preparation for Holy Orders beyond the general BA degree, since 1843 the examination had been voluntary only in name: many bishops had made its certificate a requirement of Cambridge men before accepting them for ordination.20 Venn had to prepare for eight papers of a selected portion of “the Historical Books of the Old Testament; the Greek Testament; the Gospels, Acts, and a selected portion of the Epistles; the Thirty-Nine Articles; Liturgy of Church of England [and] Ecclesiastical History for the first three centuries of the Reformation in England.”21 All this was to be covered within a month of hard study, and in Venn’s opinion, this month represented “almost the only preparation for my profession which I underwent.”22 Though an exaggeration—in the 1850s candidates for the examination were required to have attended lectures delivered during one term by at least two of the three theology professors, and college life offered a number of informal opportunities for motivated clergymen-to-be, ranging from libraries to lectures by divinity professors—formal requirements for clerical education were, indeed, minimal.23 As a junior fellow of his college, Venn was ordained in November 1858, on the very title of this fellowship, making the bishop’s examination in the Ely Diocese for him the “merest farce.”24

Venn believed that he emerged from this process altogether ill prepared, not so much theologically but pastorally:

I had never attempted a sermon or address of any kind, written or spoken, to any class of persons; of course I knew not a word of Hebrew; knew nothing of the tenets of constitution of any of the dissenting bodies in contact with whom every Church of England clergyman has to work: and beyond the minimum of experience gained from having taught in the Jesus Lane Sunday School during [the] long vacation [of 1854] I had experienced no sort of relation with the poor from a religious or any other point of view.25

Venn’s criticism echoed a broader contemporary dissatisfaction with the preparation that ancient universities like Cambridge provided for ordination and ministry. Unlike High or Broad Churchmen, Evangelicals, as evidenced by Venn’s concerns, focused on the need for better preparation for preaching and pastoral parochial work. Indeed, what Venn regretted most was not the little amount of professional training, something that could in principle and would, in fact, eventually be provided by more specialist theological study, but rather the complete lack of informal, personal guidance:

Where a whole system is in fault, one must not too strongly blame individuals. But it is impossible not to feel that something more might have been expected on the part of Clayton. He was the sole tutor, with the good income, and the influence which that post conferred: he was himself a parish clergyman: and he was the current representative of Charles Simeon in College position and religious opinions. But, to the best of my memory, not one hint or suggestion of help did he ever give to any pupil of his who was expecting to take orders.26

Until 1900, even when the practice of entering orders as a matter of course had ceased to exist, the bishop expected evidence of a particular vocation and vocational training prior to ordination. Venn had enjoyed a generalist training in the form of the “Voluntary Theological,” but what seemed to have been lacking on his part was a truly personal calling to the ministry.27 Evangelical churchmanship was a hereditary calling that Venn, also for utter lack of any other options, deemed obligatory and unavoidable. When Henry Venn expressed his pride for his son’s ordination in 1858, writing that “I have now to thank God for the fulfilment of the desire nearest to my heart of any ever cherished by me,” his wording reaffirmed the close bonds forged by Evangelicalism between churchmanship and family:

On Sunday you were much in my thoughts. I had to preach a C.M. sermon at Clapham, at St. Paul’s, which stands on the site of the old Clapham Church in which my grandfather was curate, of which my father was Rector & used sometimes to officiate. Beneath the pulpit lie the remains of both. . . . All my recollections were thrown into the past [e.g., to] the position I occupy as the 3rd & which you occupy as the 4th generation of those who have endeavoured to witness to the truths of the blessed gospel which bring salvation & peace to the soul of fallen man.28

Clerical Life (1858–62)

Venn took up an unpaid curacy under James Faithfull, vicar of Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, some fifty miles to the south of Cambridge, almost immediately after his ordination on 14 November. At Cheshunt, Venn soon experienced that theology, as it was often said at Cambridge, has “nothing to do with religion.”29 When the first Sunday came, he found that one practical result of his lack of clerical preparation was that he could not even get a sermon ready: “I tried to fill a number of sheets of paper with remarks which could be spun out for 20 minutes if possible: but no platitudes which I could venture to put down into writing would come into my head.”30 Venn’s solution was to change places with the other, more senior, curate so that he could take the address to “a set of rustics” in Goff’s Oak, a hamlet two miles outside Cheshunt; being less afraid of the poor congregation there, Venn managed to “hold out for the required 15 minutes.”31 The next week Venn adopted the plan of beginning very early on Monday and compiling something each day. Since Faithfull was too kind and courteous to give him the hints and advice that he “sorely needed,” it was clear that help had to come from elsewhere if Venn wanted to live up to the high expectations of ministerial work that the example of his father and uncle had set for him.32

Neither the college tutor or the divinity professor nor the bishop or the vicar, but Henry Venn was the key influence in Venn’s early clerical life at Cheshunt. Henry Venn belonged to an older generation of Evangelicals who saw the development of ministerial skills as an ongoing process for which the personal example and guidance of a more experienced clergyman was all-important. Given his dedication to paternal Christian duty and his parental pride in a son who had found his Evangelical calling, Henry Venn was more than willing, even thankful, to fulfill that role. During the period of Venn’s curacies, his father not only made up for the deficiencies of clerical preparation but also permeated every aspect of his personal and professional experience of clerical life.33 It was at his father’s insistence that Venn had accepted an unpaid curacy at Cheshunt in the first place, hoping that his light duties would allow him to continue his religious education. When his son admitted to lacking expertise and confidence in the writing and delivery of sermons, Henry Venn reassured him that such difficulties were common and offered help on the construction of sermons around a simple text and almost-constant encouragement, written and oral, to his son to persevere. At one point, he sent some of his own sermons written as a young preacher and preserved for the benefit of his future offspring, even traveling on one evening “through the cold and the densest of fog” to assist and hearten his son.34 At other times, Henry Venn supplied for his son so that he could spend time at Hereford to receive tips on sermon delivery from his uncle or dine with bishops to introduce himself into the appropriate ecclesiastical circles.

Following his time at Cheshunt in November 1859, Venn briefly returned to Cambridge, where he was ordained priest at Ely on Sunday 13 November before taking a temporary curacy for the winter with William Tilson Marsh at St. Leonard’s, Hastings. Tilson Marsh was the son of William Marsh, a follower of Simeon and an acquaintance of Henry Venn. Venn again found fault with his position, describing Tilson Marsh as a “vain and foolish Evangelical.”35 A major advantage of the curacy, however, was that Venn could be near his sister, Henrietta, who had fallen seriously ill and was spending the winter in lodgings with their cousin Mary Hope (née Sykes), where their father Henry Venn joined them for the Saturdays and Sundays. At Hastings, Venn lived pretty much the same life as at Cheshunt. He divided his time between long walks in the afternoon and the study of theology and philosophy during the mornings and evenings, reading and carefully abstracting such classics as John Pearson’s An Exposition of the Creed (1659), Francis Bacon’s Collected Works (probably Basil Montagu’s edition, 1825–31), and John Locke’s An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689).

Between March 1859, when he left Hastings, and October 1860, when he would begin his “second spell of curateship” in Mortlake, Venn held no regular curacy but did occasionally help one of his father’s friends here and there.36 He was free to spend the summer months with his aunt and uncle. When Venn arrived at St. Peter’s, Hereford, Emelia and John Venn were absent from the parish, and it was his responsibility to take services. “What defects his congregation found in my doctrines I do not know,” wrote Venn in an attempt to compare himself to his uncle, “but they must have noticed a terrible contrast as far as voice and delivery were concerned.”37

With no living of his own to offer to his son, Henry Venn actively participated in the search for further curacies, asking Evangelical friends and associates for suggestions.38 Henry Venn’s hope for his son was to find a permanent curacy at a place nearby where the family could live together. As he wrote on 16 June 1860: “The fondest hope of my heart for . . . future years has been that I might be . . . with you in your ministerial charge. The little specimen I had at St. Leonard’s Church served to increase this desire to an intensity which would make a disappointment a most severe trial: so that I shall take no step towards a settlement anywhere till you take a curacy.”39 After turning down an opening at Holbeton because it did not offer something settled, Venn concluded that nothing else could done than to “take any curacy that may offer itself and give up the hope of finding a place where you and H could live.”40 Some two months later, in August 1860, Henry Venn wrote to his son that his greatest wish for him was that God would “place you in the right post of labour, where you may have the highest of all joys [in] bringing sinners to a vital union with Christ.”41 But perhaps also aware of his son’s cautious desire for a fresh start away from “friends and acquaintances,” expressed in response to an offer from his father’s former curate, Henry Venn added that “much as I long to be near you, this desire is, I thank God, as nothing compared with the desire of your future ‘crown of rejoicing’ & I cannot bear the thought of interfering with that object for the sake of my own comfort or profit.”42 Around September, the curacy in Mortlake was found, with Thomas Manley as the perpetual curate. It was Henry Venn who visited Mortlake to investigate the opportunity, reporting back that the church was “ugly” but “easy to fill” and the parish “agreeable,” having “the richer people of a higher class & none of the very poor.”43 He also found out what he could about Manley’s credentials, which were pronounced satisfactory in the same letter, his views being “very decidedly on the right side.”44 All in all, Mortlake was everything Henry Venn desired for his son, though he was quick to add that he would not interfere further and should only wait and pray.

When Venn became curate of Mortlake in the autumn of 1860, his father moved the family home from Highbury to East Sheen, giving his oldest son a home at sufficient proximity to the CMS headquarters at Salisbury Square. Henry Venn would look back on the months that followed with much nostalgia and affection. His son, on the other hand, soon found out that in Manley, “a thorough humbug” addicted to “secret drinking,” he had once again met with an utterly disappointing Evangelical incumbent.45 Though able to compose and deliver a sermon, Manley was too idle to devote himself seriously to parish duties or to give any guidance to his curate. “A few words of oily speech, and an affectionate shake of the hand in the vestry once a week,” Venn recalled, “constituted almost our whole intercourse from month to month.”46 Venn would later feel that he “should have left the place very soon,” but he stayed at Mortlake for over a year, a length of time for which he had two justifications.47 One was the sense of obligation felt to his father who had recently taken a house in the parish with the sole aim to be nearby. Another was Manley’s neglect, which left him plenty of time for the private study he preferred. Venn lived much the same life as in Cheshunt and Hastings. He studied for several hours every morning and evening, walked through Richmond Park during most of the afternoon, and limited his preaching to the afternoon congregation of schoolboys, schoolgirls, children, and women servants who, if they attended at all, took “everything for granted.”48 Henry Venn, who “very soon took Manley’s measure,” probably saw some benefits in the whole situation, for he never recommended his son to leave.49

Once again, the theme of Venn’s autobiographical narrative was his strong sense of dissatisfaction, in this period especially with himself and with those around him. Venn found himself wanting as a clergyman, recognizing his lack of professional training but putting the emphasis on his own weaknesses and difficulties and the poor sense of duty of each of the incumbents under whom he served. Venn’s negative view of himself as a curate was largely inspired by his feeling of being unable to live up to the high standard of Evangelical clerical vocation set for him by his father and uncle. Given that he wrote from the hindsight perspective of an apostate clergyman, Venn’s clerical expectations may also be seen to reflect an awareness of the changing status of the clerical office, developing from a gentlemanly pursuit into a profession with pastoral skills and theological knowledge. These two imperatives—family and professional—were intertwined in the case of Venn’s clerical life: though favoring practice and guidance over theory and specialized training, Henry and John Venn were themselves exemplars of the seriousness with which ministerial work would come to be viewed. Venn himself would later contrast his own light burden of services and his overabundance of time for study with the huge workload of the younger generation.50

New Horizons: Self-Acquired Ideas and Friends

During his curacies at Cheshunt, Hastings, and Mortlake, Venn devoted much time to study. It was at this point in his life, when he was in his midtwenties, that he encountered the books that were to influence his religious position and open up the paths he was to pursue in his long academic career.51

At Cheshunt, in 1858, Venn had spent a happy and prosperous year. His clerical duties consisted of Sunday sermons and, in the winter, of daily cottage lectures and classes for the poor inhabitants of the large parish’s many hamlets.52 Venn greatly enjoyed the mental activity of having to talk to a dozen people while sitting among them, because the setting made it almost impossible to “talk quite such irrelevant platitudes as can be vented from the elevation of a pulpit.”53 With many spare hours in the morning and evening, Venn was able to read more than in any other previous year at Cambridge, furthering his theological knowledge by learning Hebrew; working hard on commentaries on the Greek Testament by Johann Bengel, Henry Alford, and Charles Ellicott; and devouring the religious works of James McCosh, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Henry Longueville Mansel. Of his studies at Cheshunt, Venn would comment, “It was a time of considerable progress mentally, but scarcely spiritually, to me. I mean that I did not at all change my religious convictions there, but simply gained more theological knowledge.”54 Venn, who would always retain a great liking for Paley and who carried a small copy of Butler’s Analogy in his pocket on his many hikes, read McCosh’s Method of the Divine Government (1850) again and again and found its defense of the principle of design in nature in light of recent scientific discoveries very informative.55 Venn was acquainted with McCosh through Mansel, some of whose controversial Bampton Lectures were visited by his old school friend William Berkley, who introduced Mansel’s work to Venn. Mansel in The Limits of Religious Thought Examined (1858) made use of William Hamilton’s Kantian point that the human mind was conditioned by time and space not only to undermine all contemporary attempts to reject Christianity on rational grounds but also to argue that because God could be known only through revelation, his existence was simply to be accepted. For someone like Venn who came from an Evangelical background founded on the idea of a personal relationship to God, the claim that the human mind could neither grasp the infinite nor, by implication, know what was meant by God’s mercy must have been rather shocking. Mansel’s arguments, which, on Venn’s cousin Leslie Stephen’s reading, were “simple and solely the assertion of the first principles of Agnosticism,” stirred a public debate in which Broad Church thinkers like F. D. Maurice and Arthur Stanley and the liberal John Stuart Mill each attacked Mansel.56 Venn, however, was much impressed by Mansel’s “pompous rhetoric” and “almost overwhelmed” by the way in which he knocked over one heterodox German after another in his attempt to acknowledge the Bible as the supreme authority in matters of faith.57 McCosh, Mansel, Maurice: all these different Victorian religious thinkers would leave their mark on Venn not because he agreed with any or each of them, but because their display of learning appealed to him and they made him aware of the existence of intellectual alternatives to Evangelicalism.

At Hastings and Mortlake, Venn also became acquainted with theological works even further outside the range of his Evangelical experience, including newer works of liberal theology, such as the man of letters Edward Strachey’s Hebrew Politics (1853), which “advised us,—to use a phrase once so denounced by opponents of the Essays and Reviews—to ‘read the Bible as we should read any other book.’”58 Venn also familiarized himself with older philosophical traditions, like the empiricism of Francis Bacon and John Locke, whose systematic approach perhaps appealed to Venn’s orderly mind but stood in stark contrast to another book he devoured at the time: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection (1825). A challenge to authors like Locke and Paley, Coleridge was a Platonist who emphasized a reflective progression into Christian truth by looking into one’s own soul. Venn first read Coleridge’s work when William Berkley visited his cottage at Goff’s Oak in the summer of 1859; continuing his habit, acquired as an undergraduate, of abstracting books in order to better absorb their contents, Venn would read Coleridge over and over in this manner.59 What Venn seemed to have taken from Coleridge, and which he may be seen to have theorized in his Hulsean Lectures of 1869, was that Christianity was not a theory or a body of doctrines but first and foremost a way of life.60

Venn’s wider reading was facilitated and its impact reinforced by a self-acquired group of friends, which included William Berkley; Charles Monro, a Caian contemporary; Albert Venn Dicey, a relative; and eventually also John Seeley. With these men, Venn could engage in earnest conversation over shared texts, such as Butler’s Analogy, Tennyson’s poems, and Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection, which created common ground for intellectual debate on religious matters. What Venn could not do with his father, or the clergymen under whom he was serving, he could do with his friends: to scrutinize and question his inherited Evangelical beliefs in a comfortable setting of free discussion with like-minded peers whose opinions he valued and respected and who encouraged him to articulate his.

The dominating person in Venn’s clerical life, however, was his father, living nearby during all his curacies. Although he constantly encouraged his son to study and look for support from men of acceptable views, Henry Venn could not foresee the influence of Venn’s friendships and conversations, away from the eyes and expectations of his family. What must particularly have troubled him was that his son’s main companion in Mortlake was John Seeley, the classical scholar at Christ’s College Cambridge and at that point a master at the City of London School, of whom Venn had first heard as an undergraduate and who now came to him “as a ray of light in that wealthy, most respectable, but dull suburban district.”61 Venn saw most of Seeley during the years immediately before and after the publication of Ecce Homo (1865), Seeley’s anonymously published work—“a life of Christ” without a hint of his divinity—which in its first year provoked as much religious controversy as Essays and Reviews and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.62 Venn and Seeley made acquaintance in 1860, though it was only a few years later that their friendship became intimate. “It was hardly likely,” as Venn wrote, “that one whose mind was then teeming with the ideas which took the world by storm . . . should have been really intimate with the curate of Mr. Manley, and all that he stood for in the way of religion.”63 During their many walks in Mortlake and their vacation rambles in the southern countries (1862), the Yorkshire dales (1865), and North Wales (1866), Venn and Seeley would, indeed, not speak much on the topics discussed in Ecce Homo; perhaps at that time, as Venn suggested, Seeley “purposely kept off the subject.”64 However, Seeley, an Evangelical son who was well versed in classical and literary studies and was influenced by the works of Carlyle, Coleridge, and Broad Church thinkers, greatly impressed Venn with his “wide knowledge and brilliance of intellect.”65

As a curate, Venn continued the undergraduate habit of combining walking with discussion, when he explored all villages around Cambridge with university friends to discuss books and ideas. The practice remained the same, but the association between ideas, people, and locations took on a quite different form: Venn was now exploring religious texts far outside the Evangelical corpus. He recalled walking with a Cambridge contemporary, when working as the curate of Mortlake, “how, near Merton, we got on to the doctrine of Atonement, and whether it was just that one should suffer in place of another [and] how, as we wound round the descent from the down, by Micklesham church, we got onto Tennyson’s Love and Duty.”66

Early Religious Development

Among other things, Venn in his autobiographical sketch tried to define his “actual state of belief” over time, as it transformed from Evangelicalism to his mature religious position.67 Unlike John Henry Newman, the theologian prominent in the High Church Oxford movement, whose model of religious development used in the Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864) he adopted, Venn was unable to specify the dates at which this or that particular idea or doctrine was doubted or rejected. Venn’s chronology of his religious development is, therefore, imprecise, even though he did manage to sketch its general course.

What is clear is that between the late 1850s and early 1860s, the period of his curacies, Venn’s Evangelicalism, which he had “taken bodily over” from his father initially stood entirely untouched, with no specific doctrine rejected.68 At the same time, there is no doubt that the process of what Venn himself called “de-conversion” had definitely been set in motion: Evangelicalism was “actively attacked on every side” by nearly all the books he read and “implicitly contradicted” by his conversation with friends.69 Venn would later have great difficulty in fully grasping or even describing what exactly was his religious position at the time and why he did not, like so many of his Victorian contemporaries, experience a “crisis of faith” followed immediately by the emergence of a new certainty.70 One reason seems to have been that his Evangelicalism was not founded on theological doctrines that could separately be made explicit. Venn’s creed had, by his own admission, been somewhat hazily accepted “as a whole” and was “only held together by emotions,” of which the chief one was reverence for those for whom he had immense respect, particularly his father.71 Hence, even though Venn had recently entered a new world of ideas, he was “not shocked or in any way religiously disturbed” by Mill’s On Liberty, and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species did not produce the “full effect that [it] should have.”72 Another reason, suggested by Venn himself, might have been that none of the theological, philosophical, and scientific texts he was reading offered a full-fledged and ready-to-hand alternative for the religious, Evangelical outlook on life and the world.

Although they were too intellectualistic to topple his emotionally accepted beliefs, the books Venn read and the discussions he engaged in during his curacies did spark his struggle to work through the logic of his own position—asking himself on what basis a belief could be held and what he actually believed. What is implicit in Venn’s narrative is, indeed, a “change in the basis on which [he] approached religion and belief.”73 Venn had always been an Evangelical by emotional attachment rather than by the kind of rational conviction apparent from his father’s and grandfather’s writings. Venn’s religious development arguably started as soon as authority was given to reasons and arguments rather than emotions, that is, when he started to engage with religious ideas intellectually and critically. What struck Venn in the course of his wider reading and discussions was not that Evangelicalism might be wrong but the very fact that it was “only held together by tradition or from respect for those I reverenced.”74 Only after this realization had set in could his newly acquired knowledge, whether from reading Mill or talking to Seeley, have its impact on the doctrines that were at the core of the Evangelical scheme.

Venn separated out what he termed “accretions,” such as Sabbatarianism, which were among the first concepts he rejected.75 These were followed by “outworks,” like verbal inspiration (“the full inspiration of God’s Blessed Word; on all which subjects to err is fatal, and to doubt is to die”) and the truth of the Mosaic narrative.76 Already in rejecting verbal inspiration and in downgrading it as an “outwork” rather than as a core tenet, Venn made a clear distinction between his own theological priorities and those of leading Evangelicalists, aligning himself with a position taken publicly by liberal Broad Churchmen. The more “central doctrines,” such as the total depravity of man, were for some time nominally accepted, but Venn eventually came to realize that his studies of Mill as well as of Jeremy Bentham and John Austin were “evacuating these doctrines of all significance.”77

Around 1860, when he was in his mid-twenties, Venn continued to call and see himself as an Evangelical. He may not have experienced a crisis of faith, but he was privately gradually departing from the theological ideas that to the public eye lay at the very core of midcentury Evangelicalism.

Public and Private Religious Identities

At the end of his year in Cheshunt, Venn had found himself in a “queer position,” believing himself to be unlike any other curate in the whole of Britain—preaching the Evangelical creed every Sunday “without the slightest insincerity or suspicion,” and studying Mill’s attack on Victorian moralism in On Liberty for hours every weekday.78 Venn evidently became conscious of a growing divergence between his public and private positions. Owing partly to his concern for his family, especially for his father and sister, and partly to fear of his parishioners and clerical brethren, however, Venn’s changing religious position was not immediately reflected in his public stance.

The first time that Venn himself became explicitly aware of his own public reserve was during the 1861 debate about Essays and Reviews, the edited volume of six clergymen and a layman, the majority of them Oxford men, that caused “the greatest religious crisis of the Victorian age.”79 Like many others, Venn first heard of its existence through a forty-page review published in the national and secular Westminster Review in October 1860 that did much to inaugurate its notoriety.80 The reviewer, the “ardent twenty-nine year old convert to Positivism” Frederic Harrison, welcomed the volume as the reductio ad absurdum of the Broad Church or Liberal Anglican “tendency of mind” in the Church of England; when pushed to their logical conclusion, he argued, the method of historical biblical criticism and the concept of progressive revelation that were the key to the book would not, as the Essayists had hoped, lead to a “rationalist neo-Christianity,” but to a secular positivism that stood “in direct antagonism to the whole system of popular belief” and was “incompatible with the religious belief of the mass of the Christian public.”81 Harrison’s review concluded by attacking the Essayists for abandoning Christianity without honestly following this radical step through by leaving the Church of England. Another reviewer, Samuel Wilberforce (whose nickname was “Soapy Sam”), in the January 1861 number of the Anglican Quarterly Review, rejected the whole volume as a “hopeless attempt at preserving Christianity without Christ, without the Holy Ghost, without a Bible, and without a Church” and held that the Essayists could not, “consistently with moral honesty, maintain their posts as clergymen of the Established Church.”82

Venn, for his part, found himself very much in agreement with the general spirit and even with some of the details of the liberal Broad Church views expressed in Essays and Reviews.83 The words the Essayists choose to articulate the book’s aim in the anonymous introductory notice to the reader may, indeed, be seen to echo the impetus for Venn’s private exploration of his religious position: it was “an attempt to illustrate the advantage derivable to the cause of religious and moral truth, from a free handling in a becoming spirit, of subjects liable to suffer by the repetition of conventional language, and from traditional methods of treatment.”84 What Venn particularly valued about Essays and Reviews was its rejection of a passive acceptance of traditional doctrines derived from the Bible and its controversial attempt to “read the Bible as we should read any other book.”85 The Essayists examined the very subjects with which Venn was struggling, such as the infallibility of the Bible, verbal inspiration, atonement and eternal punishment. And in drawing on the works of authors like Thomas Henry Buckle, Henry Maine, and other positivists to support their theory of progressive revelation, in which the Bible became a record of how God progressively disclosed more sophisticated religious knowledge as humankind became more capable of appreciating it, the Essayists used ideas by which Venn himself was being greatly stimulated at the time.86

Following the controversy over Essays and Reviews sparked by Harrison’s review, the Anglo-Catholic High Church and Evangelical Low Church parties both accused the Essayists, dubbed “septem contra Christum,” of heresy and radicalism—with the former party stressing ecclesiastical authority and blaming the book on a reaction against extreme Calvinism and the latter party emphasizing scriptural truth and blaming the book on a reaction against Romanizing tendencies from Oxford.87 The leaders of the High and Low Church parties eventually overcame their schism and decided together to draw up an impassioned declaration that was posted to all clergymen, with a letter begging them, “for the love of God,” to sign it. When the so-called Oxford Declaration appeared, which was to reassure the public that the Church of England maintained without any reserve or qualification the verbal inspiration and divine authority of the scriptures, Venn’s was not among the thousands of signatures that were soon obtained. Venn knew that mere abstention from denunciation of the views of the Essayists would have been enough, in orthodox circles, to attract attention; in not signing the clerical declaration, while simultaneously preaching Evangelical sermons and privately approving of Essays and Reviews, Venn self-consciously accepted the inconsistency of his own position.88 He would later praise himself lucky that the orthodox vicar Manley had not “send it round to me with a request to sign it or depart.”89

How it was that Manley did not send it round . . . I do not know, for much pressure was put on curates and other dependent clergy in many places. I belonged to a local clerical society, of which [R. E.] Copleston, rector of Barnes was the head,—Manley would have nothing to do with it. . . . The declaration was produced, and I presume signed by every one but myself.90

Venn’s position was in fact less unorthodox than he might then have expected, as his own father, who had already expressed his concern at the “movement among the clergy of the Oxford diocese,” also did not sign.91 But whereas Henry Venn’s decision resulted from an unwillingness to accept that the doctrinal standpoints of other church parties were in some way equal to those of the Evangelical party—a sign of the hardening of party position—his son was among those of a younger generation who were unable or simply unwilling to take any orthodox or dogmatic stand whatsoever on Anglican orthodoxy.

Because of the publicly advertised Evangelicalism of his family’s network, Venn apparently chose to explore his religious identity in complete isolation, away not only from his father but also from his cousins Fitzjames and Leslie Stephen.92 For example, in reply to a concerned letter from his father in 1862 about a family rumor that Leslie Stephen was “one with Maurice,” Venn appealed to personal distance, writing that “about Leslie I know nothing. I never see him & we have scarcely any friends in common.”93 Venn probably overstated his case, as by that time he and Leslie Stephen were both involved in the organization of the Moral Sciences Tripos at Cambridge. The fact was, however, that, though dealing with the same texts, ideas, and problems, the two cousins never spoke about religion. An additional impetus may have been given to Venn’s silence over his sympathy for liberal Broad Church views by the public outcry over Essays and Reviews, with Evangelical periodicals like the Christian Observer calling for the removal of Frederick Temple, one of the Essayists, from his post as headmaster of Rugby and with the prosecution before the Church Courts of two other Essayists, Rowland Williams and Henry B. Wilson, defended in court by Venn’s cousin Fitzjames Stephen.

Another outcome of the Essays and Reviews controversy pertinent to Venn was that when in the course of the 1860s the Broad Church party vanished as an alternative to the High and Low Church parties, incognito liberal churchmen like himself were left without a clerical position in which they could take refuge.94

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Early in 1862 Venn concluded that he could no longer remain with Manley at Mortlake, a connection that he believed to have been “a mistake both on my father’s part and my own.”95 Venn was increasingly coming to recognize both the poor clerical example set for him by Manley and, partly by his own reading and partly by the indirect influence of his friends, his own alienation from the Evangelicalism that he still professed publicly and that was being forced on him.96

I feel certain that there was no insincerity on my part, but any of my friends who heard me preach . . . must have been somewhat puzzled to reconcile what they heard me say in the pulpit and what they heard me say when walking in Richmond Park. There was no insincerity, in the sense of my saying in public what I did not believe, but I must admit that there was reserve, in the sense of not saying a great deal which I did believe.97

Given his self-admittedly strong innate “reverent” and “religious” temperament, Venn may well have kept his curacy had his vicar been a moderate Broad Churchman whose character and abilities set a clerical example and whose Anglicanism allowed for “free discussion.”98 As he would later write about his situation in 1862: “I was not naturally more sceptical than hundreds, or perhaps thousands, who find no difficulty in adhering conscientiously to the Church. I was sceptical rather than inquisitive in purely theological doctrines, about which indeed I felt no very keen interest.”99 But as things stood at Mortlake, Venn saw no other option than to announce to Manley that he would leave him in a couple of months—a proposal of which Manley was as glad to hear as Venn was to make it.100

At the end of his curacy, Venn’s religious identity operated simultaneously on a variety of levels. During a period in which he formally affirmed his Anglicanism by accepting a fellowship, taking Holy Orders, and preaching the Evangelical creed in the pulpit, Venn privately started to examine the nature of his own religious position. Although the foundations of the process of self-definition that would eventually bring him to abandon Evangelicalism had thereby been laid, Venn unhesitatingly continued to call himself an Evangelical.101 Venn’s intellectual readiness to explore a wide range of new ideas, such as those in Essays and Reviews, and to reject certain theological doctrines of his upbringing was clearly not yet matched by a similar readiness “to break the bond of respect for his father” or “to expose his views to scrutiny on the public platform.”102 Venn did experience a personal conflict between the private imperative to ground faith on reason and the emotional pull of his family’s religious tradition to publicly subscribe to the Evangelical party. But for many years he seemed to have been able with all honesty to reconcile within himself a public affiliation to Evangelicalism and a private dismissal of Evangelical theology, one that others around him were already beginning to find incompatible with continuation in orders. Venn left Mortlake in July 1862, taking his departure quietly; he delivered no farewell sermon and received no testimonial.103 He would return to residence in Cambridge early in October after a summer tour in Switzerland—with knapsack and on foot—and a short stay at Llanberis with the Stephen family.

4

Intellectual Breakthrough

(1862)

We continue the story of Venn’s intellectual development in the period between the late 1850s and early 1860s. The focus will be on his reading and discussion of new philosophical, rather than theological, ideas during his time as a student and curate, where the key event was his introduction by a friend to the work of John Stuart Mill. Venn was immediately captivated by Mill’s work, which, though not in the least disturbing him spiritually, posed fundamental challenges to his approach to religion, with its plea for free expression of opinions and the scientific examination of belief. A System of Logic (1843) and Principles of Political Economy (1848) above all offered Venn a starting point for a definition of his own secular identity: more than any other young men of his generation, including Fitzjames Stephen and Henry Sidgwick, Venn began his academic career as a dedicated follower of Mill’s philosophical outlook, the major tenets of which were central to the fields of study he would choose to pursue over the next quarter century.

Drawing on his wide reading, particularly of Mill and Henry Thomas Buckle, Venn made his first foray into print in 1862, aged twenty-seven, while still working as a curate in Mortlake. A piece of some originality but little influence outside his own oeuvre, “Science of History” engaged with the contemporary debate on the abstract possibility of a science of sociology and the predictability of human actions. Venn’s contribution was to raise a practical, yet, in its sidestepping of determinism, clearly religiously inspired objection, namely, that a prediction itself would have an impact on human action that needed to be taken into account in the prediction. Venn submitted a draft to Fitzjames Stephen, who praised his cousin’s rigor and offered comments, before getting it published in Fraser’s Magazine.

Venn’s first paper, whose context and content will be examined in detail in the course of this chapter, proved to be a modest breakthrough: it took an important step toward his first book, The Logic of Chance, in which it was reproduced as a chapter, and it was instrumental in his decision to return to residence in Cambridge shortly after its appearance.

Intellectual Landscape

Cambridge (1853–57)

Looking back on the time of his matriculation at Cambridge in 1853, Venn characterized himself as an unsophisticated nineteenth-year-old boy from an Evangelical home whose mental activity had only recently awakened.1 “It may seem incredible to the present generation,” wrote Venn, “but I believe it is the fact, that when I went to College I had only read two novels”: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Quentin Durward.2 During his undergraduate year, when all his friends belonged to the rigid and anti-intellectual Evangelical camp, the only book on his shelf not of a classical or mathematical nature had been his great-grandfather’s Complete Duty of Man.3 Meanwhile, as Venn later regretted, “much of the short seed-time of youth was lost.”4 Following his move from lodgings in Peas Hill to college rooms in 1854, Venn’s circle of friends at Cambridge had gradually come to include companions of a different yet still largely orthodox stripe whom he saw “frequently and at all times of day [and] night.”5 A Cambridge student in times of “sluggish academic instruction,” Venn had learned something, though not much, from lectures and a great deal from his own study, supplemented by private coaching. Given the dominance of classics and mathematics and obsession with the tripos, however, it was to his friends and their conversation, in “tea-hours and walking-hours,” that Venn owed the first great step in the broadening of his horizons.6 Once again, it was not formal education but informal influence that was responsible for Venn’s intellectual development.

Whiting, Garrick, and Monro (see figure 4.1) first introduced the young Venn to the literary world of Shelley and Byron—who “deeply affected” and “completely dominated” him for a while—and Tennyson—whose “rule was more complete and lasted for very much longer.”7 Like so many of his contemporaries, by the end of his student years Venn had become a passionate Tennysonian, a supporter of Tennyson’s new poetic English and struggle to maintain religious faith in the face of growing scientific knowledge.8 Venn would later recollect Monro’s first reading of Tennyson’s “Fatima” to him in his rooms in Caius Court: “The concentrated passion there displayed, and the setting of the desert scenery in which it is conveyed [“I roll’d among the tender flowers / I crush’d them on my breast, my mouth / I look’d athwart the burning drouth, / Of that long desert to the south”] powerfully affected me.”9 Despite their unmistakable emotional and aesthetic power, neither Shelley nor Byron nor Tennyson either influenced his opinions or took any intellectual hold over him: “I read Byron and Shelley in my room, and ‘spouted’ them when alone, but they . . . conveyed no teaching to me, or this teaching ran in a channel entirely distinct. The scoffs of Byron, and the occasional defiant Atheism of Shelley, scarcely shocked me, and certainly never in the least disturbed my . . . opinions.”10 At this stage, the intellectual and the religious were still two channels running parallel without interfering, and Venn’s experience of a greater variety of religious ideas came, not from firsthand exposure, but from secondhand demolition in orthodox papers. By natural temperament, the logical bent of his mind, and his Cambridge mathematical training, within the intellectual sphere Venn was drawn toward the rational and scientific, rather than the romantic strand of Victorian thought, though he could already be easily moved by a Ruskinean sight of nature’s beauty and touched by lines from one of Tennyson’s poems.

4.1 Venn, aged twenty-two, among Caian friends, December 1856. From left to right: J. Gould, J. P. Garrick, J. Venn, J. Mansel, D. Panton, W. W. Gedge, J. E. Whiting, C. H. Monro, E. J. Holloway. Reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

It was to Charles Monro that Venn owed most as per his early mental development, that is, “in the way of speculation.”11 Their freshman year had been a small one, and Venn and Monro, who had come up to Cambridge with a brilliant reputation in Greek verse, soon made acquaintance; in fact, Monro was the first person that Venn remembered speaking to upon his arrival. But given their shyness and their belonging to different camps at Caius, it took well over a year before Venn and Monro became close friends. During their many walks through the villages around Cambridge, Venn not only discovered Monro’s extraordinary gift for ancient and modern languages but also found out that Monro was a skeptic, “morbidly conscious,” and prone to Socratic disputation.12 “If one once got into argument with him one was . . . in it till far on at night,” Venn recalled, adding that “no convention, and no loose arguments were allowed to pass, whether in theology, politics, literature or science.”13 Rather than through certain viewpoints, Monro influenced Venn by the personal example of his speculative mind and the unwillingness to accept any opinion merely from tradition. Somewhat surprisingly, it was in mathematics, of which Monro knew almost nothing, that Venn felt the intellectual stimulation of Monro’s conversation most strongly: “There was a deal of unintelligent [talk] about the ordinary treatment of the higher branches [of mathematics]. Monro would raise some speculative difficulty, and one had to defend the accepted conclusions as one best could. It was of no use to say that such and such a result ‘was true at infinity’: one would be scornfully asked if one had been there to see.”14 After his graduation as sixth wrangler and his election to a junior fellowship, Venn began what he himself called his “literary study”; with an eye to a three-month grand tour with Arthur Ransome in the summer of 1857, Venn took lessons in German and Italian; read his uncle James Stephen’s Lectures on French History (1852) and John Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), Stones of Venice (1853), and Modern Painters (1848); and studied the accounts of Napoleon in the Alps and Hofer in Tyrol in Alison’s History of Europe (1857).15 Between his return to Cambridge in October 1857 and his first curacy in November 1858, Venn for the first time made a few friends outside his own college, including Arthur Blunt, of Pembroke—afterward a very close friend; J. Barton, of Christ’s College; and T. L. N. Causton, of St. John’s. He was also acquainted, through Monro, with Henry Thomas Buckle’s History of Civilization in England (1857–61)—the “Novum Organum of historical and social science,” with which he was immediately taken.16 “His faults, as well as his merits, made him highly suggestive to one in my then state of mind. His parade of almost universal learning was very imposing, and the paradoxical character . . . of some of his views forced the attention and interest of every reader.”17 Influenced by Mill, the French positivist August Comte, and the Belgian statistician-royal Adolphe Quetelet, after years of preparation Buckle had taken the reading world by storm with his sweeping conclusion that all human behavior was subject to social laws as much as the planets were subject to physical laws. Many Christian writers—that is, almost all English commentators—ridiculed Buckle, not in the least for his apparent denial of free will. But for Venn, Buckle’s History of Civilization was a highly suggestive work whose notion of a science of society fascinated him. Its promise and implications would eventually present themselves as a subject for academic study, one that was not mathematical but nonetheless amenable to the kind of rigorous analytical treatment in which Venn was trained.

Cheshunt, Hastings, and Mortlake (1858–62)

During each of his curacies, in Cheshunt, Hastings, and Mortlake, Venn gave over considerable time to continued study, seeking to make up for what he perceived as the lack in his education and catching up with a wide variety of recent publications. Some of his theoretical reading, particularly the work of Buckle, Mill, Austin, and Maine, represented a starting point for his future academic research, beginning with his first article in 1862.

At Cheshunt, Venn’s clerical post was an honorary one, in terms of payment, with few clerical duties, and he was able to continue his theological knowledge, learning Hebrew and working on the Greek Testament and commentaries. Of his studies in 1858–59, Venn commented that it was a time of “considerable progress mentally, but scarcely spiritually.”18 He read much by Mansel, to whose work he owed an introduction to the Scottish common sense philosophers Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart, and a return to Butler, with whom he had been familiar since school.19 But the great event in that year was without a doubt the introduction, through Monro, to the name and work of John Stuart Mill:

I remember the occasion vividly. My friend C. H. Monro had come down to spend a night with me . . . and had brought with him the then recently published volume on Liberty. We began talking about the subject, and my only association with the name was that there had been a theological professor or preacher called Mill at Cambridge some years before, and I wondered if it was the same man. Monro left the book behind him for me to read, and I found myself from beginning to end in an entirely new world of thought and feeling.20

On Liberty did not shock or in any religious way disturb Venn, though its novelty and challenge must have been clear to any twenty-four-year-old Evangelical clergyman. Venn was, indeed, “almost bewildered” by Mill’s protest against the moralism of Victorian society, with its Protestantism-inspired narrowness and the “pinched and hidebound type of character” it propagated.21 On the one hand, On Liberty may well have come as a rather shocking criticism of Evangelicalism, the religion of Venn’s own experience, which put heavy emphasis on the struggle to curb man’s innate sinfulness. At the same time, Mill’s description of the restrictive tendencies of Evangelical Protestantism resonated with Venn, who by that time was aware of the existence of what he himself described as narrow and rigid Evangelicals outside his family circle. Venn certainly was influenced by Mill’s spirited defense of the freedom of thought, which must have strengthened his own feeling that, with an eye to their development, all opinions should be expressed freely and all beliefs tested and defended in a friendly environment of peers.22 At one point in his autobiographical sketch Venn explained his own religious journey in explicitly Millian terms: “Free expression of one’s opinions, is, I feel sure, one of the best ways of forming and stiffening them. This free expression I never had; partly owing to the potential coercive restraint of my vicar, and partly owing to the actual restraint which my reverence for my father imposed upon me.”23 On another visit to Venn’s lodgings in Cheshunt, Monro, walking the ten miles from Barnet, where he lived, brought with him the first volume of Mill’s A System of Logic (1843). Venn turned over the pages and at once hit on all kinds of logical subjects that deeply interested him.24 He borrowed the book but quickly bought a copy for himself, proceeding to study it and making an abstract of it from the beginning to the end.25 Not much later, he did the same with Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848). Both books were part of Mill’s overarching project to reform society by reforming the “philosophy of the age.” A System of Logic, a “reformer’s book” whose systematic discussion of logic, scientific method, and social science had “an authority in England that was positively papal,” was written from the belief that, before morality and politics could be duly changed, “intuitionism,” the philosophical handmaiden of conservatism that embraced the existence of necessary, a priori truths, had to be defeated in its stronghold—science and mathematics.26 Given Mill’s “inescapable presence” on the intellectual landscape of the mid-nineteenth century, Venn was not the only young Cambridge man impressed by his books and attracted to both the general approach and particular elements of his positivist outlook. On Liberty, A System of Logic, Principles of Political Economy, and other of Mill’s writings were also of much importance, among others, to Venn’s cousins Leslie and Fitzjames Stephen and his future colleague Henry Sidgwick, each of whom drew on Mill’s work in defining their scientific identities, finding in it a basis for reflection on the pertinent questions of their generation. None of these men were ever full disciples of Mill, however: following on their youthful enthusiasm, they eventually took issue with certain elements of his work and moved on to other positions. Venn, though from the beginning by no means uncritical of the philosophical aspects of Mill’s thought and in later years even a fierce opponent of his political, social, and moral views, would see himself, and would be seen by his friends, colleagues, and commentators as one of Mill’s most loyal followers, at least within the field of logic.27

The summer and autumn of 1859 Venn spent at his quarters in Goff’s Oak, overlooking the Loo marshes and the hills toward Epping Forest. Together with two or three of his friends who paid him an occasional visit, Venn made long walks through the Hertfordshire country and enjoyed nightly discussions of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and other recent literary publications. “In my enforced leisure,—for the residents then took little or no notice of a curate,” Venn wrote, “I got through a large share of reading”: apart from Hebrew and theology, he continued his study of Mill and made acquaintance, through his friend Berkley, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge.28 Like Ruskin and Tennyson, Coleridge widened Venn’s intellectual landscape to include not only the rational and scientific strand of Victorian thought linked with Mill but also the romantic strand, which emphasized introspection, love of nature, and manliness. Venn’s intellectual commitment was ultimately, and would remain, with the former, but the two strands were not mutually exclusive. For example, in his careerlong attempt to understand certainty and belief, Venn always recognized that there was something to everyday life that escaped scientific rationalization. And even though he came to believe that the evidence for Christianity should be examined scientifically, Venn was convinced that to be religious meant to live religiously rather than to rationally adopt Christian doctrines.

Most of 1860, for Venn an idle and desultory year, was spent in the open air.29 Between March, when he left Hastings, and October, when he began at Mortlake, Venn visited the Lake District for a month in June; he enjoyed the “savage loneliness” of the Scottish countryside, in July and stayed at his uncle John Venn’s at Hereford for the rest of the summer.30 At Mortlake, Venn once again lived the same clerical life as before: he read for hours every morning and evening, carefully abstracting the philosophical work of the British empiricists Bacon and Locke, and walked through Richmond Park most afternoons. During the summer of 1861, when several friends came to stop at his lodgings, Venn extended his range through excursions with Norman Macleod Ferrers, afterward tutor and Master of Caius College and at that time “a keen University reformer and an interesting person generally”; Blunt, an intimate companion; and his brother Henry.31 Venn’s fondness for walking and mountaineering with friends often blended with the romanticist call to appreciate nature at first hand. One morning in May 1862, upon reading an account of Thomas de Quincey of “the beauty and calm of a long night’s walk” taken after an interview with Coleridge, a “foolish fancy” seized Venn and his brother to walk out and see the sun rise on Leith Hill, the highest summit in the southeast of England.32 Mortlake had a number of eminent residents, including the controversial naturalist Richard Owen, but the only resident of Mortlake of importance, so far as Venn was concerned, was Seeley, who was then just leaving Cambridge to take up his mastership at the City of London School. Venn and Seeley took many walks together, avoiding the topic of religion, and they enjoyed their mutual fascination for Tennyson: whereas Venn could recite hundreds of lines of Tennyson’s poems—which he regularly did to “beguile the way” on long walks and to send his traveling companions to sleep—he held Seeley to be able “to restore by memory the whole of In Memoriam, had that poem been lost.”33

During a time when some of the literary masterpieces of the Victorian age were coming out, Venn largely avoided novel reading. There was still somewhat of the “survival of the Puritan notion that such reading was frivolous,” a “foolish” Evangelical sentiment in retrospect, for Venn absorbing himself in a novel felt like eating cake for breakfast every day.34 Venn’s wide contemporary reading of everything from Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection to Mill’s System of Logic allowed him to share an intellectual framework with Oxbridge-educated men from his own generation. It was only many years later that he found that not a few of “the very ablest and most learned” among them were “almost omnivorous in their capacity for swallowing and digesting current novels.”35 Around the early 1860s, when he was in his late twenties, Venn was just beginning to read the novels of Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Thackeray, and, through his second cousin Albert Venn Dicey, George Eliot. Throughout his life, Venn remained unable to accept novel reading as a leisurely pastime: it was always something undertaken with a specific purpose in mind. Because of this old Evangelical puritan inclination, he would always be more a reader of French novels, especially those by Alphons Daudet, than of English: if novels were, indeed, but “sorry food for the human soul,” reading French was at least useful practice.36

While duly aware of the publication of epoch-making books like On the Origin of Species (1859) and Essays and Reviews (1860), both of which he read, Venn was at that time much more struck by the subject matter of Henry Maine’s Ancient Law (1861) and John Austin’s Province of Jurisprudence Determined (second edition, 1861).37 Venn was introduced to the work of these towering figures in nineteenth-century jurisprudence in the early 1860s by Monro and Dicey. Like others around him, including Fitzjames Stephen and Seeley, Venn was impressed by Maine’s comparative and historical approach to the study of law, which, though admired by Mill himself, was aimed at the indifference to history exhibited in Austin’s work on jurisprudence and Mill’s work on political economy alike. Perhaps more strongly than the methodological importance of history, what was impressed on Venn when reading Ancient Law was a sense of historicity: he was particularly bewildered by the novelty of Maine’s illustration of how familiar concepts of family, property, and nation were historical constructs of the modern Western world.38 This historical understanding might well have brought Venn and others of his generation to recognize that religious thought and academic institutions, among other things, were also historically determined and, as such, might be replaced by new thinking and institutions more fit for their age. However, it was the abstract and analytical approach of Austin, whose legal positivism emphasized the classificatory but static nature of jurisprudence throughout the ages, that most appealed to Venn on a scholarly level. Austin introduced Venn to what he called an abstract theory of “Rules of Action of which Ethics and Law should be sub-divisions,” a theme that he would return to in later life when writing the final chapters of The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic.39 None of Venn’s future publications on logic would explicitly bear the mark of having been written in what Leslie called the “post-historical” era in English thought; Venn did not look to history to historicize the subjects under study but to find anticipations of present conceptions or to expose those that were deemed permanent. Indeed, the point of his very first publication was exactly to problematize the possibility of studying history scientifically for its own sake.

First Publication (1862)

Unlike some of his more prodigious contemporaries who wrote their first papers as students, at the age of twenty-seven Venn had not written anything, either private or for publication, beyond weekly letters and sermons. Somewhere in the course of 1861, however, Venn decided to work out a point that had struck him two years before while reading Book VI (“On the Logic of the Moral Sciences”) of A System of Logic, in which Mill discussed the “abstract possibility of a science of Sociology, and in particular of predicting the course of human actions.”40 Venn read Mill’s discussion through the lens of Buckle’s History of Civilization in England—especially the doctrine of, to use Venn’s own words, the “necessity of human actions as indicated by the statistical regularity of apparently the most casual and capricious acts”—which Venn had studied yet another year earlier on a summer’s day at Penmaenmawr, Wales, in 1858.41 “To Buckle I owe an immense debt,” Venn himself emphasized, for “he was undoubtedly the author who first gave me an impulse in the direction in which my later studies have lain, and which, but for him, they might never have assumed.”42

Before discussing the content of Venn’s first publication, “Science of History,” its background is sketched, highlighting the elements of Mill’s and Buckle’s work that caught his attention and the difficulty he spotted in their highly influential and timely contributions toward a social science.

Buckle, Mill, and Social Science

A self-taught gentleman of independent means, Buckle had been catapulted into celebrity status by the publication in 1857 of the first of three volumes of History of Civilization in England, the provocative and ambitious work that sought to do for the history of man what had already been done for the different branches of natural science.43 Many prominent Victorians saw Buckle as the first “scientific historian” and praised him for showing that the course of history, much like that of nature, was governed by laws that explained, for instance, how nations such as Britain had progressed over the course of the centuries and that even offered a glimpse into their future development. What excited much comment and criticism was Buckle’s radical claim that insofar as these causal, fully deterministic laws knew no right or wrong, neither God nor individual free will nor the state played a role of significance in shaping the course of human history.44

Buckle’s soon famous “General Introduction” to History of Civilization in England claimed that anyone who believed in the possibility of a science of history was committed to the view that the actions of men, “being determined solely by their antecedent, must have a character of uniformity, that is to say, must, under precisely the same circumstances, always issue in precisely the same results.”45 Buckle referred to what he took to be proofs of the existence of uniformity in human affairs, taken from the work of Quetelet, which allegedly showed that murder, suicide, and crime occurred at a constant annual rate in any given society. What deeply puzzled Venn and immediately began to raise many doubts and vague suspicion was Buckle’s additional “fatalistic” claim that, however casual and capricious the actions of individuals might seem, the statistical regularity of human behavior proved that each act was a necessary consequence of certain social laws.46 As Buckle wrote in the passage that astonished Venn:

In a given state of society, a certain number of persons must put an end to their own life. This is the general law, and the special question as to who shall commit the crime depends of course upon special laws; which, however, in their total action, must obey the large social law to which they are all subordinate. And the power of the larger law is so irresistible, that neither the love of life nor the fear of another world can avail any thing towards even checking its operation.47

Buckle was a close reader of Mill’s System of Logic, and he wholeheartedly agreed with Mill that it was possible to create a “social science” because the law of causality applied to human actions as much as it did to natural phenomena. For his part, Mill, in the last four editions of his System of Logic, added to Book VI a fairly positive chapter on Buckle’s History of Civilization in England. Here, he praised Buckle for his popularization of the idea that “the collective series of social phenomena, in other words the course of history, is subject to general laws” and endorsed his case for the importance of statistical regularities in this regard.48 At the same time, through all editions, Mill’s discussion of the possibility of a social science in the influential Book VI was critical of Buckle’s use of statistics to prove the predictability of human actions. According to Mill, human actions were always the joint result of general causes (“the general circumstances of the country”) and special causes (“the great variety of influences special to the individual”) on whose uniform continuation each mass statistical regularity depended. The key passage from A System of Logic here was the following, which, owing to its importance for Venn, is worth quoting in full:

If we . . . take the whole of the instances which occur within a sufficiently large field to exhaust all the combinations of . . . special influences . . . ; and if all these instances have occurred within such narrow limits of time, that no material change can have taken place in the general influences constituting the state of civilization of the country; we may be certain, that if human actions are governed by invariable laws, the aggregate result will be something like a constant quantity. The number of murders committed within that space and time, being the effect partly of general causes which have not varied, and partly of partial causes the whole round of whose variations has been included, will be, practically speaking, invariable.49

On the one hand, in spite of the unavoidable imperfections in the data resulting from the period of a year being too short to include all combinations of special causes and too long to exclude new general influences, Mill could see the annual murder rates as a “verification a posteriori of the law of causation in its application to human conduct.”50 On the other hand, Mill strongly opposed the idea that the individual murderer was, in a sense, “a mere instrument in the hands of general causes; that he himself has no option, or if he has, and chose to exercise it, someone else would be necessitated to take his place.”51 Rather, according to Mill, each particular murder depended on general causes combined with a great variety of special causes ranging from character and temperament to parentage and “habitual associates.”52 Given the amount and complexity of the causes of social phenomena, statistics could never, pace Buckle, turn social science into a science of exact predictions analogous to the physical sciences. Mill pointed out that in astronomy the causes that influence the result are few and change little, “and that little according to known laws”; hence, it is possible for astronomers to know what they are now and at any point in the future.53 Within social science, Mill believed the situation to be completely different. Here, the circumstances that influence the “conditions and progress of society” are innumerable and perpetually changing; and “though they all change in obedience to causes, and therefore to laws,” the multitude of causes at play is beyond calculation.54 Although social scientists were perhaps unable to predict social phenomena, they were still deemed able to obtain knowledge of what Mill called general tendencies, either by deduction from known general principles or by empirical laws, that is, by finding “general propositions which express concisely what is common to large classes of observed events.”55 Examples of these general propositions or empirical laws Mill found in history and statistics. Given its dependence on the stability of causes, however, especially the role of statistics—which Mill did not regard as a distinct road to truth, but as providing data needed for the deductive generalizations on which social science was based—was strictly limited in Mill’s opinion:

When the immediate causes of social facts are not open to direct observation, the empirical law of the effects gives us the empirical law (which in that case is all that we can obtain) of the causes likewise. But those immediate causes depend on remote causes; and the empirical law, obtained by this indirect mode of observation, can only be relied on as applicable to unobserved cases, so long as there is no reason to think that no change has taken place in any of the remote causes on which the immediate causes depend.56

Mill and Buckle shared the positivist vision of creating a social science analogous to the physical sciences. But, even though statistics was more important to the justification of his project than to its execution, Buckle’s “statistical enthusiasm” remained wholly at odds with Mill’s scientific and philosophical outlook, in which statistics played a negligible role in the search for causal laws and in which the influence of individuals was deemed crucial to historical change.57

“Science of History”

Buckle’s dismissal of God and free will in his account of historical development had made him a controversial figure among Liberal Anglican historians, Radical Liberals, and Utilitarian thinkers alike. Rather than explicitly choosing sides in this nationwide debate, Venn formulated his dissent from Buckle by seizing on a rather subtle theoretical point that had not been taken into consideration in Mill’s discussion, in Book VI of A System of Logic, of predicting the course of human actions: namely, “the influence of the forecast itself on the action of the agents concerned.”58 Because Buckle provided him with a vantage point from which to engage with Mill’s work, Venn would later write that Buckle was “the author who gave me an impulse in the direction in why my later studies have lain, and which, but for him, they might never have taken.”59

At the end of 1861, Venn submitted a manuscript version of his first article, which he himself deemed fairly acute and original though “terribly rough” in diction and construction, to his five-years-older cousin, the outspoken Utilitarian journalist and jurist Fitzjames Stephen. As Fitzjames Stephen, who was interested in, and published on, similar questions concerning “positivism & sociology” himself, wrote in a letter of 19 January 1862, he read the manuscript with the “utmost interest & admiration” and considered its central message to be “vigorously thought out.”60 A few months later, he procured the admission of the article into Fraser’s Magazine, a journal that then took a progressive position on issues such as freethinking and religious heterodoxy, through a letter to the editor James Anthony Froude.61

Venn opened his article by drawing attention to what he took to be the core of the recent attempts to create a science of human history: “The chief interest of the subject centeres [sic] in the inquiry—Whether the course of events can be predicted? . . . If all events admit, by their nature, of certain prediction, then a science of history is possible, or at least conceivable; if by their nature they cannot, then all pretensions of this kind must be abandoned as delusive.”62 According to Venn, three distinct issues were at stake in this regard: firstly, the abstract possibility of events being foreseen with certainty; secondly, the abstract possibility of the results of the foresight being published, that is, of a prediction being made; and, thirdly, the practical possibility of drawing specific inferences, that is, of making factually true predictions.63

The controversy over Buckle’s History of Civilization in England had hitherto mainly been focused on the first issue, with proponents and adversaries of a social science grounded on history disagreeing about whether human actions were free or not. Venn’s main aim, and his major claim to originality, was to demonstrate that even when human actions were assumed to be necessary and their future course fully predictable, the possibility of a “science of history,” that is, of “sociology,” would not follow upon this being granted.64 More specifically, Venn argued that even if strict causal necessity was extended from physical to social phenomena and even if data about all causes involved in human actions would be available, there still existed a fundamental difference between physical and social science that prevented the latter from becoming a full-blown “social physics.” Venn illustrated his claim by contrasting social science with the newly established discipline of meteorology, writing that “every one who has studied [meteorology] is ready to grant that if we were accurately acquainted with the present state of the physical world, as well as with all the laws of matter, we could predict the weather till the end of the world. Admiral [Robert] Fitzroy, too, is constantly giving us proof that it is possible to make real predictions, which shall be sufficiently near the truth to be of the utmost practical importance.”65 The present situation in meteorology offered an accurate picture of a future social science. At the same time, however, it also suggested an ineradicable contrast between the two disciplines in terms of scientific status: whereas in meteorology predictions had no effect whatsoever on the object of study, in any social science they would. According to Venn, this difference destroyed the possibility of a social science that was in any sense comparable with or similar to physical science.

The bulk of the article illustrated this fundamental difference with reference to the second and third issues—that of the abstract and practical possibility of making predictions. Venn began by setting up an example, introducing “X,” a man with “an obstinate disposition to frustrate prophecies whenever he can,” who sees the path of his daily morning walk foretold with perfect accuracy in a newspaper.66 Given that upon reading the newspaper this “X” would immediately take a different walk than before, “the prophecy is at once falsified.”67 Drawing on this example, Venn discussed two objections against his view on the influence of predictions on human actions. Firstly, there was the claim that “X’s” obstinacy, his reading of the prophecy, and his change of mind were part of the original prediction. Mill would put forward this very reply against Venn’s view in a letter written to Venn on 18 March 1868: “I will mainly, at present, say a few words on . . . the flaw which seems to you to consist in the theory of the predictability of human history, from the influence of the foresight itself may have in modifying the parts foreseen. This influence is real, but does not seem to me to affect the theory; for the self-consciousness of mankind, and the foresight of their near future is itself a foreseeable and calculable element. It might have been predicted by a superior being.”68 Venn rebutted that this theoretical objection was rendered moot by the practical fact that “X” was always able to make sure that any one of his actions foretold on moment x would not be performed on moment y.69 A second objection was that the case of “X” resembled that of the famous three-body problem in astronomy in which the position of each body is both a cause and an effect of that of the other bodies, such that it is impossible to describe the path of a new body until that of the old body is known and that of the old without knowing that of the new.70 But, Venn argued, this analogy held only exactly when the crucial difference between physical bodies and human actions was ignored: “As a book, [a prophecy] circulates like any other, and if we regard it in no other light, there is no impropriety in comparing it with any physical body. . . . But when, in addition to this, we say that the writing is to be a true report of events which, in a measure, depends upon itself, we have made another condition to which there is no analogy . . . in any of the physical sciences.”71 All in all, Venn’s argument in his first article boiled down to the statement that, in social science, “we have only to make the supposition of a man resolved to act upon a prophecy, and a prophecy of that man, if it be known, becomes impossible.”72

The conclusions for the practice of making predictions that Venn drew from these abstract considerations were twofold. Firstly, in order for a prediction to be true, “it is to have no influence upon the conduct of those to whom it refers.”73 Venn’s dry humor clearly came out when he suggested that the ways in which this could be done—namely, by making incomprehensible or unfindable predictions—would “damage somewhat the reputation of the prophet.”74 But Venn was being entirely serious when adding the slightly obscure remark that, since predictions could not at the same time be true and practical, there might be some predictions that were true because no one cared or was sufficiently educated to devote the kind of attention needed to verify or falsify them in practice.75 Secondly, the effect of a prediction of voluntary actions could be found either in its self-defeat (“Nineveh prophecies”) or in its self-fulfillment (“Macbeth prophecies”).76 Venn concluded his article with a brief reflection on the prediction of involuntary actions, writing that if there were any such things in the human realm, they would probably be found “only amongst the first principles of our nature; just those, in fact, which remain invariable, and therefore do not require or admit of prediction.”77

Taken together, on the basis of the impossibility of the prediction of human actions, Venn was able to argue against Buckle and Mill that the hope of turning social science into a physical science was necessarily in vain. What he did, albeit less explicitly, was to show that neither the practical aspects of daily life nor the existence of free will could be theorized away for the sake of science. Fitzjames Stephen remarked in his letter of 19 January 1862 that he himself had come “very near” Venn’s point, though “from another side of the question.”78 Venn, finding the problem of prediction in the very act of expressing it, had shown that the variability of individual behavior precluded social science from becoming a physical science. In his review of Buckle’s History, Fitzjames Stephen, for his part, had found the problem of prediction in conceiving it, arguing that, unlike physical science, social science had to deal with an indefinite number of circumstances.79 Despite the apparent similarity, the positions that resulted from their arguments were very different and, as such, representative of two major tendencies in (the reception of) Mill’s System of Logic. Where Fitzjames Stephen followed Mill’s argument, in Book VI, that a science of society had to be founded on a science of individual man, Venn would take up Mill’s remarks about probability, in Book III, to work out what he himself considered the central implication of individual variability for the notion of statistical regularity: that statements in probability theory neither presupposed nor justified any conclusion about individuals, and that they should thus be interpreted as predictions of long-run statistical frequencies of events. Over the course of the early 1860s, Venn would turn this observation into a full-blown theory of probability theory and statistics, found in his Logic of Chance (1866).

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During the late 1850s and first years of the 1860s, Venn’s intellectual horizons broadened significantly, with his reading including both canonical and recent philosophical and scientific books, introduced to him by his friends. Venn absorbed himself in both strands of “Victorian thought and sensibility”: defying the dichotomy, he shared the temper of romantic critique, being suspicious of the reductive tendencies of science and moved by observations of nature, but was most taken with the intellectual call of positivism, which eschewed traditional sentiments in favor of rational scientific examination in all fields of study.80

From the beginning of his intellectual development, Venn preferred certain works and debates over others, with his early interest leaning toward methodological questions about the possibility and limits of scientific investigation. Through his criticism of Buckle and Mill in “Science of History,” Venn not only made his first foray into print; he also touched on the theoretical foundations on which the moral sciences at Cambridge were being developed by his future colleagues and laid the ground for the closer examination of inductive logic and statistics in his Logic of Chance (1866), the book that would first put his work and thought, rather than merely his name, on the Victorian intellectual map.

5

Moral Scientist

(1862–69)

When Venn first came up to Cambridge in 1853, he had found an unreformed university that was still very much a pillar of the Church of England, denying membership to non-Anglicans and functioning largely as a mathematical seminary. Venn himself was very much a creature of the old system dominated by the Mathematical Tripos. Some ten years later, when he returned to Cambridge to pave his own road from Evangelical son to university don, he would contribute his share to the first major reform of the university and colleges since the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603).1 As a catechist, college lecturer, examiner, member of the Board of Moral Sciences Studies and author of textbooks that became recommended reading for students, Venn played an important role in the development of the reconstructed Moral Sciences Tripos and in the reforms creating new academic disciplines in nineteenth-century Cambridge.

During the 1860s, the contradiction between Venn’s public and private religious positions that had become apparent at Mortlake were transplanted into a new context. At Cambridge, his self-acquired identity as a professional logician and member of the informal, liberal Anglican circles of John Grote and the Cambridge Apostles F. D. Maurice and Henry Sidgwick overlapped with the public expression of his inherited identity as an Evangelical clergyman and thinker. Despite his nominal Evangelicalism, Venn not only had taken Holy Orders (1859–60) and spent time as a curate (1860–64) but would also marry a woman from a sound Evangelical background (1867), preach before the university (1869), and write for the Evangelical Christian Observer, to which his grandfather and father had also contributed.

This chapter examines Venn’s contribution to university and college reform and the emerging aspects of his academic identity as a teacher, reformer, and participant in Cambridge life in the 1860s. These aspects will be placed in the context of broader changes in the teaching and learning of a university, the content of its education, and ideas on what it meant to be a professional academic. This newly acquired identity will be juxtaposed with emerging elements of his inherited identity as an Evangelical clergyman in future chapters.

Catechist and College Lecturer: Moral Sciences Tripos

Catechist (1862)

Given that in medieval times the university and not the colleges carried the responsibility of student instruction, the original statutes of Caius had made no reference to a teaching office and did not expect the fellows to instruct others.2 The first regular lectureship at Caius was established in 1538, that of the catechist following some fifty years later, in 1592, though it was regularly occupied only after 1608. King James I, in 1619, imposed the duty of “catechizing” on all the colleges, stating that “we do require and command that the commendable use of catechizing in colleges betwixt the hours of three and four on Sundays and Holydays be carefully and duly observed.” From the seventeenth century on, the office of catechist was filled routinely by one fellow after another, the teaching being mainly of a religious kind. The interest reawakened in 1838, when a college order decreed that the catechist was to give eight lectures in moral philosophy—the emphasis thus shifting from religious to ethical topics—to the junior sophomores, and examine them in the subject of his lectures in the May examination. Some two years later, in 1840, further importance was given to the role owing to a “Wortley exhibition” (£20 for one year) awarded to the best answerer in the examination in moral philosophy.

A new annual appointment was made every year until 1862, when the recent reconstruction of the Moral Sciences Tripos (founded in 1851) and the arrival of students preparing for the Indian Civil Service called for some alteration. Venn, who then still held his curacy in Mortlake, proposed a scheme for improving the ancient office of catechist at a college meeting held in December 1861. Between 1851 and 1855, a Whewell Moral Philosophy Prize was awarded to the “two Persons who should shew the greatest proficiency in Moral Philosophy in the Examination for the Moral Sciences Tripos,” and in the May term, the catechist at Caius gave some five or six lectures in preparation for it.3 This was an improvement, but the catechist was changed every year and confined his lectures to elementary textbooks. Given that the stipend, though small (about £50), seemed “sufficient to justify a good deal more work,” Venn proposed to make the office permanent and to assign to the proposed catechist the duty of teaching logic and political economy to the Indian Civil Service candidates who were in residence—the newly reformed Moral Sciences Tripos being scarcely taken into account at Caius at the time.4 Venn’s proposal was supported by Norman Macleod Ferrers, the later master of Caius, and a friend with whom Venn shared a passion for walking and climbing. Around the end of 1861 Venn, however, still had “not the least intention” of returning to Cambridge.5 At the Easter college meeting of 1862, the senior fellows accepted the scheme and offered the post to Venn, who now seized on this “convenient opportunity” to leave Mortlake.6 Venn resigned his curacy in July 1862. He spent the summer working systematically on the texts on which he was to lecture and arrived in Cambridge early in October to attend the thirty-second meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Rather than the half dozen hours during one term in the year—the traditional duties of the catechist—Venn lectured three times a week every term. He soon found out, however, that the Indian Civil Service students, for whom the post had effectively been reconstituted, were far too few to fully occupy him and that the only prospect of making himself useful was “to throw myself into the Moral Science Tripos work.”7

The Moral Sciences at Cambridge

When Venn returned to Caius in 1862, Cambridge found itself in the midst of a decades-long process of reform, which had started internally but was eventually enforced from outside by the first royal commission, the Graham Commission of 1850–52, when the university had sacrificed its chances at self-reformation.8 All resident fellows at Caius were reformers, though “narrow” and “common-place” ones whose advocacy of reform arose from “dissatisfaction with details of management” rather than, as in the case of the towering figures of William Whewell, Adam Sedgwick, and George Peacock, from any deep thoughts on the ideals of a liberal education.9 “Not a single man,” Venn believed, “had the slightest knowledge, or the slightest wish to know, what was done at other Universities, or what was the past history of our own University.”10 By turning an ancient office into a post dedicated to the moral sciences, Venn threw in his lot with the “ardent young University reformers” of his generation, who, unlike some other Cambridge dons, wholly embraced the introduction of new subjects of study and were willing to pursue university reform through college changes.11 Venn’s formal (and informal) involvement in the Moral Sciences Tripos took place at a transition period of the university, when the new statutes of 1860, imposed by terms of the Cambridge Act—given royal assent in 1856—had come into effect while those “who were to work the Statutes had all been trained in the traditions of the past.”12 During the previous ten years, from 1851, when it was established, to 1860, the Moral Sciences Tripos “enjoyed but an uncertain tenure of existence.”13 It was only after its reconstruction in 1861 that it began to flourish. Venn duly realized that he was associating himself with a new pathway to a degree that was still held in low repute, among fellows, lecturers, and professors alike, as a “solid training” for the “really able student.”14

Following the appointment of the liberal and reform-minded Lord John Russell—Bertrand Russell’s grandfather—as prime minister, a Cambridge syndicate had been established in 1848 that was to explore options for internal reform. All members, including Whewell, who was the foremost expositor of conventional educational thinking at Cambridge, were resigned to very slow progress, and more eager to complement and enhance the old than to embrace the new. A hurried search for a modified status quo—changing the university from within before something radical would be imposed by Parliament from outside—their report introduced a pair of new examinations: the Natural Sciences and Moral Sciences Triposes. While these broke the curricular monopoly of mathematics and classics, the report nonetheless insisted on the “superiority of the study of Mathematics and Classics over all others as the basis of a general education.” This view reflected Whewell’s ideal of a liberal education, set out in successive versions of his Of a Liberal Education (1837–52), which distinguished between “permanent” and “progressive” studies: permanent studies were “those portions of knowledge which have long taken their permanent shape; ancient languages with their literature, and long-established demonstrative sciences,” and progressive studies were “the results of the mental activity of our own times; the literature of our own age, and the sciences in which men are making progress from day to day.”15 Given this curricular dualism, the natural and moral sciences triposes were originally founded in such a way as to prevent “any great disturbance of our existing system.”16 Both triposes would not only improve attendance at professors’ lectures, so as to make their existing roles within Cambridge more solid. The triposes would also meet the growing criticism of the narrowness of the traditional Cambridge curriculum and cut short the call to remove mathematics and classics from their place at its foundation.17 A compromise clothed as internal reform, the Moral Sciences Tripos was inspired more by the agenda of conservative and hierarchical internal reform than by a desire to revisit Cambridge’s place within a changing world.18 Indeed, for Whewell the new tripos was an opportunity to establish authority over rapidly changing fields of study at the expense of secular, utilitarian, positivist, and empiricist approaches—all connected, at least in Whewell’s mind, with his adversary Mill—that “rejected the inherent capacities of man’s nature and the traditional structure of society.”19 At the same time, there were several respects in which the Moral Sciences Tripos was an innovation. For example, its (German) focus on the professoriate, which stood in tension with the (English) collegiate ideal, could be seen as a secularizing move, since of the Moral Sciences Tripos chairs, only the Knightbridge Professorship was limited to those in Holy Orders.

The new Moral Sciences Tripos was constructed as a collection of five subjects, each the responsibility of five different professorships, selected and newly combined from preexisting Cambridge chairs: moral philosophy, history, political economy, English law, and general jurisprudence. It attracted very few students at first. Between 1851 and 1859 the annual average of candidates was around five; in 1860, there were no candidates at all. One of the main reasons for this failure was that it could initially be taken only by those postgraduate students who had already obtained mathematical or classical honors. This ruled the moral sciences out as a course of study for the bulk of the undergraduates who, after achieving success in the previous (or “Little-Go”) examination, took the ordinary degree. Another major reason for the tripos’s initial disrepute, both inside and outside Cambridge, concerned the incoherence and heterogeneity of its syllabus. Under Whewell’s direction, its curriculum had been dredged from a pond of preexisting professorships; no new chairs were created or altered for the occasion. By 1859–60, it was clear that in its present state the tripos was hardly worth preserving. It had to be either abandoned or reconstructed. The former would reduce the status of the professors and leave Cambridge open to the charge that it ignored the developing disciplines and cared but little for the average student. After considerable pressure, the Senate in 1859 approved a petition for the appointment of a syndicate to consider what changes should be made in the Moral Sciences Tripos. The scheme, drawn up by John Grote and John E. B. Mayor—respectively Venn’s future mentor and elder brother of his direct colleague Joseph Mayor—recommended allowing for undergraduates with only an ordinary degree to obtain BA (honors) in the Moral Sciences Tripos; to set up a Board of Moral Sciences to agree on examination standards, the syllabus, and booklists; and to replace English law by mental philosophy.20 Both Grote and Mayor, anticipating that the Senate would disapprove of the recommendations, submitted flysheets in their support. Grote, who succeeded Whewell as Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy in 1855, repeated the criticism, previously voiced by Mill and his protégé Alexander Bain, that Cambridge was “almost the only school of higher instruction in the world which takes (may it be said so?) no account of logic or philosophy in any form, and makes no attempt to educate the reasoning powers by any other means than mathematics and grammar or ancient literature. I would like to see the University taking a wide interest in the intellectual movement of the country.”21 Much to Grote and Mayor’s own surprise, the recommendations were fully accepted in February 1860. The decision had far-reaching consequences—the dominance at Cambridge of mathematics and classics was formally broken and a one-year postgraduate course became a three-year undergraduate honors course in its own right. But serious problems, of course, remained. A new Board of Moral Sciences, effectively replacing the professorial control over the tripos, was established (comprising, among others, Grote, Mayor, and Whewell), which took up the difficult task of creating a scheme of studies at once systematic and closely knit. After its reorganization under the guidance of Grote, the Cambridge moral sciences course at first came in two sections, with students being required to study one of the two: moral and mental philosophy and logic in one; history, political philosophy, political economy, and jurisprudence in the other. Despite these and other changes, the tripos continued to be regarded as rather unsatisfactory: because the most able men did not devote themselves to it, the standard was low, which, in turn, discouraged promising young men from trying to find an opening there. During the decades that followed, the tripos would be altered again, excluding history and jurisprudence (in 1867) and political economy (1903), to become the residual domain of “Anglophone” philosophy.

College Lecturer (1867)

The introduction of the new subjects of logic and mental philosophy into the Moral Sciences Tripos gave young followers of Mill, such as Venn and Sidgwick, an opening that they seized. As catechist of a rapidly changing college with an “old-fashioned conservative” master, Venn not only championed a relatively young course of study but also showed commitment to the idea that both the university and the colleges had active roles to play in teaching students.22 Venn himself had much suffered from the old regime in which “no personal direction or supervision was offered by the College” and in which the mental discipline acquired through mathematics or classics was considered the raison d’être of a liberal university education.23 With his appointment in 1862 to the position of catechist, teaching Caius candidates for the Indian Civil Service and Moral Sciences Tripos, Venn started his years-long contribution to Cambridge reform—one in which college teaching was greatly extended; newly appointed college lecturers, whose post carried no dogmatic obligations, became specialists who turned their subjects into disciplines; and the moral sciences transformed the university from a seminary into a place where the social elite was prepared for a self-chosen profession or trade.24

Given the tiny handful of candidates for the Moral Sciences Tripos, their instruction and examination had been left to the five professors around whose subjects the tripos had been established. Until 1862, when Venn returned to Caius, the only college (i.e., nonprofessorial) teacher in moral sciences was Joseph Mayor at St. John’s, where he had been appointed to guide poll men toward the ordinary degree. Venn lectured three times a week every term, devoting most of his time to the two or three men in college whom he found prepared to read for the Moral Sciences Tripos, aligning his teaching completely with their needs. Venn also took a small number of private pupils reading for the Moral Sciences Tripos, among whom were Arthur James Balfour, the future prime minister, and Frederic W. Maitland, later Downing Professor of the Laws of England.25 Like Mayor before him, and Sidgwick and Alfred Marshall after him, Venn had graduated under the old system and was initially not more than an “amateur” and “diligent learner” in the moral sciences.26 Many of the books appearing the “List of Books agreed to by the Board of Moral Sciences Studies” for logic and political economy—his main subjects—ranging from Aristotle and Bacon to Richard Whately and Mill and from Adam Smith to Malthus and Ricardo—were at first totally unfamiliar to him.27 “I am certain that we did not know anything like so much as the average lecturers [later did], but we had a naïf interest in subjects which were opening out before us. I cannot but suspect that something of what our pupils lost by our lack of learning they must have found replaced by our sympathetic interest in their own struggles.”28 Similarly, upon his appointment as one of the examiners for the Moral Sciences Tripos in 1863, Venn wrote that “I shall have to set papers I presume in Logic & Political Economy. . . . There is not any very formidable amount of work recognized for it, but as some of the subjects or authors I am not very familiar with, I sh have to brush them up during the vacation.”29 During the early 1860s, a small body of young and like-minded moral sciences teachers, working under Grote’s wing, was shaping a new body of knowledge while learning about it alongside the small of number of students they taught and examined. Venn greatly enjoyed working in a friendly and intellectually open environment in which students and teachers were devoted to a common purpose:

We had the entire management of the “Faculty,” if one may call it so. We could practically arrange the curriculum as we pleased. . . . When, as in the case of the Moral Sciences at the time in question, every candidate for an examination had been taught by the same group of lecturers, examinations sank to their right level, being simply regarded as a means of testing the students in what they had learned; the test being practically applied by those lecturers themselves. . . . Of course the schedule of subjects, and to a certain extent the list of books, was assigned, but I can say with confidence that I was never in the slightest way constrained by any thought whether what I delivered would ultimately assume the form of a question in a paper, nor did any pupil ever show that this consideration affected his interest in what he heard.30

There were times in the 1860s that Venn despaired of attracting able students away from the Mathematical and Classical Triposes and doubted whether he really had “the knack of doing it well” for the “poor remainder” that fell to his share.31 In 1864 his father, Henry Venn, wrote to his brother John Venn of Hereford that he was “happy to say” that “dearest Johnny” was “dissatisfied that Cambridge men will not attend his lectures in any number” and that he “longs for parochial work again.”32 At a certain point, however, the numbers of Caian candidates for the Moral Sciences Tripos increased, until in 1867 Venn was able to say “that there were more men in the College reading for the Moral Science, than for the Classical Tripos.”33 It was in this same year that Venn’s post of catechist was converted into a moral science lectureship. Similar appointments of college lecturers in the moral sciences followed at other colleges, including Marshall at St. John’s (1868), Sidgwick at Trinity (1869), and Thomas Woodhouse Levin at St. Catherine’s (1873). The appointments were tokens of the relative success of the Moral Sciences Tripos as much as they were guarantees of its permanence. As such, they also reflected a broader trend of colleges assuming more responsibility for teaching, with increasingly specialized college lecturers taking over from professors and private coaches. At Caius, a decision was made to limit the tenure of its noncelibate fellowships to ten years unless combined with a college office such as a lectureship.34 Following another suggestion from his pen, in 1867 Venn obtained permission to accept students from other colleges at his moral sciences lectures: “From 1867 . . . my lectures were thrown open to the University, and my classes in Logic and Political Economy became rather large, up to eighteen or so. . . . Not a few of these were from Trinity, and of course they ceased to come as soon as Sidgwick was appointed lecturer in his own College [in 1869].”35 Venn would later often pride himself on having introduced intercollegiate lectures at Cambridge. Even though this might initially have meant merely that he threw open his classes to any students who cared to attend, it was a timely innovation that did much to break down college isolationism and contributed to the process of opening lectures to women.36 One year later, in 1868, when Venn was elected senior fellow, his scheme of intercollegiate lectures was formally endorsed by Caius, allowing students from other colleges to attend his lectures on payment of a fee. Venn himself held the scheme in high repute:

There are those who maintain that the modern student, instead of suffering the evils of starvation through the scantiness of the lecture supply doled out to him, is now more in danger of the indigestion that is apt to follow from too abundant and diversified food. The general principle is now admitted that those who pay tuition fees are entitled to competent training in every subject recognized by the University. . . . Where the student does not find what he wants within our walls provision is generally made for his attendance at lectures elsewhere.37

Several years later, in 1875, Trinity College followed Caius’s lead. After 1882, all colleges were compelled to support the university by an annual contribution to support more university lectureships. It was in the 1890s that the lectures arranged by the new university boards of studies began to rival those given in the colleges.

Academic Preferment: A First Attempt

On the basis of his experience as a catechist and the reputation he was gaining as the author of The Logic of Chance—resulting from his lectures and soon added to the list of recommended readings on logic for the Moral Sciences Tripos—Venn began to search for academic preferment.38

Following Grote’s death in August 1866, Venn, still in his early thirties, put himself forward for what was then still called the Knightbridge Professorship of Moral Theology and Casuistical Divinity (it would be renamed the Knightbridge Professorship of Moral Philosophy in 1896). Given that logic was his field of expertise, Venn’s candidacy, and the very fact that many at Cambridge agreed that he made a very good chance, showed “how very little organized the subject of Philosophy then was in the University.”39 “With anything like the present systematic division and arrangement of the philosophical Faculty,” Venn added, “I should [not] have thought of offering myself.”40 But the chair then represented the only university teaching post dedicated entirely to the moral sciences. Since Venn had been for four years almost the only lecturer in this field, and it had become clear to him that Mayor would not stand, he felt entitled to offer himself.41 Sidgwick, at that time a lecturer in classics at Trinity College, saw in Venn a “young” and “eager” candidate ideally suited for the post because he was so fully “devoted to the subject” and “thoroughly of the new school as regards his view of the professorial function.”42 This indeed was the basis of Venn’s application for an old chair whose holders traditionally did not give lectures: “Having abandoned all other university work in favor of the moral sciences, I have no other wish than to remain here permanently engaged in teaching them.”43 Sidgwick withdrew his own candidacy in the same election and felt “rather sorry for [his] friend Venn” when finding out that the eventual choice, F. D. Maurice, some thirty years Venn’s senior, also stood as a candidate.44 Sidgwick had thought it unlikely that he himself, a layman of unorthodox religious opinions, could compete with Maurice, who, though a controversial figure, had already been publishing widely since the mid-1830s, mostly on the religious and social debates of the day. At Cambridge, Maurice—a prominent Cambridge Apostle—was warmly received, but elsewhere his religious opinions, especially his rejection of party spirit, were seen as highly controversial. Venn’s father, Henry Venn, for example, “deplored” Maurice’s election.45 He saw in it a clear sign of the dangerous “transition state” of Cambridge, the Church of England, and their mutual ties.46 Venn was somewhat unpleasantly surprised too, but for professional rather than religious reasons: “[When] the electors chose F. D. Maurice . . . this rather startled the residents, as Maurice never, so far as I know, having set foot in Cambridge since he quitted it forty years before, had never been mentioned as a candidate. . . . It was to Kingsley, I believe, who was one of the electors, that the entire credit was due of thinking of him and securing his election. It need hardly be said that the good influence of Maurice was social rather than professional.”47 What concerned Venn, and Sidgwick with him, was that Maurice would not be committed to their “new school” view of “professorial functions.”48 Maurice’s influence as the Knightbridge Professor and head of the Moral Sciences Tripos, between 1866 and 1872, was, indeed, mostly through personal charm and conversation rather than through lectures or writing. During this period, in 1871, Venn would be elected, with the help of Mill and Alexander Bain, to an external examinership in logic and moral philosophy at the University of London, where he would set and mark J. Neville Keynes’s paper on inductive logic for the BSc examination.49 Following Maurice’s death in 1872, Venn would again put himself forward for the Knightbridge chair. Sidgwick, who had decided to stand only if the case of his own candidate, the nonclerical reformer James Hutchinson Stirling, turned out to be hopeless, found that Venn “really wants the professorship” and held that “the electors ought to give it to him (if Stirling is out of the question) on the ground of performance.”50 But Sidgwick, intent on leaving Cambridge if Venn or J. B. Pearson were chosen, still thought that he himself would “do better than [Venn] for the post,” to which he would be elected by Venn and others in 1883: “I think his view of the subject wants nuance and versatility: it is an acute subtle narrow formal utilitarianism as far as I can make out.”51 Sidgwick’s judgment was grounded in what he gathered not merely from conversation, but also from Venn’s “fragmentary documents on ‘Practic,’” a pamphlet printed and circulated among the electors in which Venn set out his thoughts on a system of utilitarian ethics.52 Venn would also enclose the pamphlet in a letter to Mill, where he once again asked for a written testimonial in support of his candidacy. Mill did not altogether agree with Venn’s opinions on ethics, but in a letter of April 1872 he would enclose a positive testimonial, praising both his writing and his teaching (see figure 5.1):

5.1 Testimonial from John Stuart Mill for Venn’s candidature for the Knightbridge Professorship of Moral Philosophy, University of Cambridge, 6 April 1872, GCA, Venn Papers, C49. Reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

From my knowledge of Mr. Venn’s writings I have been impressed in an unusual degree by the clearness, vigour, and precision of his intellect, as well as by his power of putting his clear ideas clearly and forcibly into words. . . . I am not sufficiently acquainted with his positive opinions in moral philosophy, to know how far I agree or differ with them; but in the case of a public thinker, his actual doctrines are often [more] important than his influence in stimulating the exercise of thought in his pupils, and at the same time guarding them by an exact method, from the ends of vagueness and looseness in thinking: and in both these respects I think it likely . . . that Mr Venn would be a highly successful thinker.53

In the end, Stirling did not stand for the vacant post, and the reformers Venn, Pearson, and Sidgwick (one vote each) lost out to the Evangelical clergyman and theological Thomas Rawson Birks (three votes). Although neither a mark of “deliberate contempt for the study of Moral Philosophy” nor a straightforward attempt “to crush it under the heel of Theology,” the rather “catastrophic” appointment was condemned at the time as a backward step in light of Birks’s religious position and lack of originality in writing and of commitment to teaching.54 As an anonymous author would complain about the appointment of Birks to the chair in the Westminster Review of 1874: “Are there not . . . Cambridge men who might fill the chair with respectable efficiency? Is there not Mr Mayor, or Mr Venn, clergymen both, if orders is essential? or better still, if a layman be admissible, is there not Mr Henry Sidgwick, than whom it would be difficult to find an abler candidate?”55 One positive consequence of the turn of events, as far as the moral sciences were concerned, was that Sidgwick decided to remain in Cambridge in his “humble position” of Lecturer “at least one year more, and most probably forever.”56 “Without conceit,” Sidgwick wrote, “I think that my going would be a blow to the study [of moral sciences], which I have nursed for several years here.”57

Cambridge Circles

A Cambridge Household

A few years after Caius had taken the rather controversial step of removing all restrictions on the marriage of its fellows, Venn was among the first fellows of his college to marry. Susanna Carnegie Venn (née Edmonstone) was born in 1844 in Marlborough, Wiltshire, as the daughter of Susanna Mary Douglas and Charles Welland Edmonstone, Henry Venn’s former curate and successor as Evangelical vicar of St. John’s Holloway. Soon after Charles Edmonstone took up the curacy in 1846–47, the family moved from a house on Grove Road, Holloway, to 9 Hornsey Lane, the house that had been the Venn family’s home before it was the Edmonstone’s. Although Susanna Venn had enjoyed the delights offered by the four-acre garden and the friendship of James Boston, the gardener who would be the inspiration for the character of Adam Daily in her most well-received novel, The Dailys of Sodden Fen (1884), “all the memories of [her] saddest years” were also associated with Hornsey Lane.58 Upon Susanna Venn’s mother’s death in 1852, when she herself was still a child, a resident governess was engaged for the three eldest children on the testimony of an Evangelical clergyman admired by her father. “Under the mask of a hypocritical & lying profession of Evangelicalism” this “Miss Bardon,” who stayed for six long years, was “false, cruel, violent, abusive in language & deceitful in conduct. She ill-treated us, beat us, knocked us about, called us by hard names, ordered us to deceive our Aunt Mrs Hodgson when she paid one of her rare visits of inspection. . . . We three poor little sisters used to sit up in bed all together & cry & pray to our mother to hear us. . . . No more wretched childhood than ours could be conceived.”59 Many years later, Susanna Venn recorded these and other events in the first volume of The Gwillians, a book originally written in shorthand as a chronicle of facts about “a motherless life left at an early age to the tender mercies of an effeminate and semi-idiotic father [and] a drunken and demoniacal governess.”60 The governess regime had ended around 1858 through the efforts of Henrietta Venn, once a friend of Susanna Venn’s mother, and Caroline Emelia Stephen, through whom contact with the Edmonstone household was maintained. After finishing her education at a school in Clifton, Bristol, Susanna Venn returned home at the age of eighteen to take her mother’s place, “full of an earnest desire & intention to do that & no other thing & to do it for the happiness of all the family & household,” which she did until 1866, when she turned twenty-two.61 During those years, the “experience of life” came to her—“I saw many people, I talked to many men & women, paid visits in big houses & in lesser ones, I heard many opinions on politics, religion & socialities, I listened & heard & thought & felt”—but her “eyes were tired—mental & bodily” from the loss of her mother and several sisters.62

Despite her intention never to marry, in November 1866 a “John Venn came to see us again—the first time after three years,” and some two months later, in January 1867, she went to East Sheen “to stay with his father & sister & we were engaged.”63 With all the financial arrangements in order, John and Susanna Venn married on 20 June at St. Margaret’s, Westminster.64 Henry Venn rejoiced in the marriage as a reinforcement of the Evangelical bonds of the previous generation, reminding his son of the spiritual aspect of the earthly family: “[I] look back on a life arrived at every stage with rich blessing—& now at the last stage with one of the richest of all—the prospect of your happiness [that] God has provided for you in dear Susan. I use the term happiness in the highest sense. . . . My joy . . . in your present prospect is in the hope & conviction that your marriage will strengthen & establish your growth in grace. This was the gracious design of the institute in paradise.”65 Some months before their wedding tour in September 1867, Henry Venn offered practical assistance in the search for a house where the couple could establish their own household.66 At the end of that year, a family house was found on Brookside, Cambridge, a desirable street with a clear view across Coe Fen Leys.67 Henry Venn again seized the opportunity to firmly fix in his thirty-four-year-old son’s mind the duty of the Evangelical paterfamilias: “Soon your visits to my roof as to home will cease. You will have a home of your own. You will be head of a family;—an institution appointed of God for the maintenance of his worship & service in any Christian land. Hence arise responsibilities, opportunities & talents. . . . The question will be . . . ‘what have your friends & your servants & your children seen in this house?’”68 Rather than a wish to establish an Evangelical household, what seemed to have bounded John and Susanna Venn was the hope to privately move beyond Evangelicalism, inspired, respectively, by wide reading and a dislike of orthodoxy.69 Together, they soon made the most of the new social element added to university life through the freedom for fellows to marry. The Venns became a fixture of Cambridge society, befriending many prominent university families—including the Darwins, the Horts, the Jebbs, the Maitlands, and the Sidgwicks, who all dined at each other’s houses—and contributing their fair share both to the local Cambridge community and to informal university reform.70

Women’s Higher Education

Venn and his colleagues not only were involved in the development of the moral sciences at Cambridge but were also committed to wider reform, both formally and informally. Sidgwick was the obvious leader. He worked for the abolition of celibacy and religious requirements for dons; campaigned to abolish the poll, or ordinary, degree and further extend the range of degree subjects; and, with equal dedication, did much to make education accessible to all who could benefit from it, including women, creating numerous educational schemes, at the university as well as at secondary and tertiary schools in the new industrial centers. During the 1860s and 1870s, when Cambridge made some of its most “generous and open-minded gestures” for many years to come, Venn acted as a “willing lieutenant” in a number of Sidgwick’s reform campaigns.71

One of these campaigns concerned the improvement of women’s education, for which they pursued a practical strategy criticized by the likes of the prominent feminist and suffragist Emily Davies, who did not wish to settle for anything less than complete equality between men and women.72 The reforms that opened Cambridge to women had roots in the beginnings of extension education—a philanthropic venture, conceived around 1850, aimed at the poor in the cities—and in the Schools Inquiry Commission (1864). Where the former had revealed a new category of social need—upper-class women hungry for academic challenge—the latter had also emphasized the educational needs of girls. Cambridge’s initial role was limited to sending university dons to the provincial towns to give lectures. A much more consequential, and widely discussed, move was made in 1864 with the opening of the Cambridge Local Examinations to girls. Some fifteen years after the foundation of Queen’s College, London, the independent girls’ school, one of the two ancient universities had now officially recognized women’s secondary education. Soon the question was raised whether Cambridge should not go further. Together with Anne Clough, who would become the first principal of Newnham College (founded in 1871), Sidgwick in 1868 successfully petitioned for the establishment of an advanced examination, women’s local examination (later known as the higher local examination), for women over eighteen years of age, with those passing being excused from the previous examination. It was instituted by the Senate in October of that year.73 Following the success of the Clough-Sidgwick scheme, Sidgwick proposed that a series of lectures should be offered in Cambridge to prepare women for the examination—a proposal that immediately found favor with his immediate circle. In December 1869, a pivotal informal meeting was held in the drawing room of the home of Henry Fawcett, the professor of political economy, and his wife, Millicent Fawcett. Among those present were Sidgwick, Maurice, Benjamin H. Kennedy (Regius Professor of Greek) and his daughters, John Peile (later master of Christ’s) and his wife, James Stuart (the pioneer of extension education), Thomas Markby (secretary of the Local Examinations Syndicate), and Susanna Venn.74 A committee was formed, which included the Sidgwicks, Maurice, Ferrers, the Fawcetts, and the Venns, and a scheme of special classes for women was drawn up for the Lent term of 1870.75 Because the lectures—English history (Maurice), English language and literature (Walter W. Skeat), algebra and arithmetic (Arthur Cayley), Latin (John Mayor), and economics (Marshall)—could not be held in university buildings, they were given in a rented room in Trumpington Street.76 At least for the first one or two terms, further lectures were supplied by sympathizers—with Venn teaching logic to a small group of women from his home on Brookside on Mondays and Fridays.77

The special lectures were an immediate success, with some seventy or eighty women attending in the first year. When in 1871 Sidgwick sought accommodation to receive women from outside Cambridge who wished to attend the lectures, Susanna Venn’s name was listed in the University Reporter as the main contact for enquiries.78 A house was found at 74 Regent Street, which Sidgwick furnished at his own expense, persuading Clough to preside and to manage the five original students, among whom was Mary Marshall (née Paley), who together formed the nucleus that would soon become Newnham College.79

Sidgwick would enlist the Venns’ further help. In the summer of 1871 he asked Venn to moderate the standard for the women’s local examination in logic and political economy against that of the equivalent examination for the poll men.80 Some years after Girton College, Cambridge’s first residential women’s college, was established—in 1869, with Emily Davies as its first principal—Venn would also take pupils from that college.81 Although women were not officially admitted to tripos examinations until 1881, in 1874 the same small group of young dons—Sidgwick, Marshall, Venn, and others—would work hard to provide women with the opportunity to sit these examinations informally. As Mary Paley Marshall would later recall: “In 1874 came the tripos, which at that time was held in December, and till the very end we were not sure whether all the four examiners would consent to look over our papers. . . . We were examined in the drawing-room of Dr Kennedy’s house in Bateman Street. . . . The Tripos papers came by ‘runners’ . . . who after getting them at the Senate House hurried to Bateman Street: among these runners were Sidgwick, Marshall, Sedley Taylor and Venn.”82 John Maynard Keynes, the son of Venn’s former pupil the moral sciences lecturer J. Neville Keynes, described the same event in even more colorful terms: “Apart from Marshall, they [the runners] were all very short and had long, flowing beards. . . . I see them as wise, kind dwarfs hurrying with the magical prescriptions which were to awaken the princesses from their intellectual slumbers.”83 At Newnham College, Mary Paley Marshall’s main teachers in the 1870s would be Sidgwick and Marshall, who taught her “by weekly or fortnightly papers, without coaching or supervision.” Venn, her teacher in logic, would deliver “delightfully clear” and “concise” lectures on Mill’s System of Logic, illustrating the methods of induction from the cultivation of plants in his own garden.84 As the tripos drew near, Sidgwick would do his best to coach Paley Marshall and Amy Bulley, Venn going horse riding with them on the Gog Magog Hills.85 Around 1874, it soon became too tiresome for Venn and other young dons to repeat their lectures for the small number of women students preparing for a tripos. A better option seemed to be to invite the young women to the tripos lectures already given for the male undergraduates. Here, Venn’s intercollegiate scheme proved helpful for Sidgwick: though great care was taken with an eye to mixing the sexes, increasingly many dons at Cambridge’s seventeen men’s colleges were willing to admit women to their lectures.

Despite continued efforts, after the 1870s Cambridge would sink into a “peculiarly mulish prejudice” toward its women students: attempts to admit women to full formal membership of the university failed when put to the vote in 1886 and 1897.86 It was not until the late 1940s that Cambridge would grant degrees to women, the very last British university to do so. One important reason was that men like Venn, once progressive reformers, became more conservative as time went on.

Grote Club and Eranus Society

An opportunity to break out of formal university strictures and find “emotional and intellectual liberation” came in 1862, when Sidgwick and Mayor introduced Venn to a small gathering of friends at Professor Grote’s house in Trumpington.87 At the Grote Club (later, when it continued under Maurice’s guidance, renamed the Grote Society), Venn would spend some of his “happiest hours” in Cambridge.88 The group, founded by Grote to bring young moral sciences teachers together, included several Cambridge Apostles and others who might have been elected to that elite secret society. It was to have a long-term impact on Cambridge intellectual life, as it gave rise to the famous Moral Sciences Club, founded in 1878 and still in existence today. When Venn joined, the regular members were Grote, Mayor, Sidgwick, J. B. Pearson, Aldis Wright, and Ralph Benjamin Somerset; in the later 1860s, it also included Alfred Marshall and J. R. Mozley as well as Maurice and the mathematician W. K. Clifford—both Apostles. The group came together once or twice a term at Grote’s vicarage, where he “hospitably entertained us at dinner, after which the evening was devoted to the reading of a paper by one of us, and its subsequent discussion.”89 Sidgwick, like Grote, was “judicially minded,” Venn—who was introduced to Mozley by Sidgwick as an “admirer of Mill”—“logical,” Mozley “speculative,” and Pearson showed the “religious ethos.”90

At the Grote Club, Venn enjoyed, for the very first time in his life, the “keen and perfectly free discussion” of fundamental principles in different domains of thought that he longed for.91 During the early years, philosophy was the center of discussion; in later years, the range of topics touched on over dinner and after the formal discussion would be broadened to include political and social issues of the day.92 There is no documentary evidence of the papers that Venn would undoubtedly have presented to the Grote Club. From what was presented by others, it is clear that Venn actively engaged in discussions about canonical philosophical questions (e.g., “What can I know?”), approached against a background of criticism of the idealism of Kant and the empiricism of Mill.93 Venn also forged new friendships with men like Sidgwick, who was four years his junior but to whose “maturity and sobriety of judgment” on philosophical and religious matters he owed much.94 What struck Venn most was the atmosphere of friendly intercourse and rigorous thinking created by the “admirable” figure of Grote: “As a ‘moderator’ in [our] discussions . . . nothing escaped his keen and critical judgment, and he asserted himself just sufficiently to draw out the thoughts of those who were shy in expressing themselves, and to keep the conversation from straggling into side issues. His extreme aversion to any dogmatic statement, which is prominent in his Exploratio Philosophica, involved no draw-back in such a position.”95 Grote was a pioneer of a particular brand of British idealism eclipsed, in Cambridge, by the work of J. M. E. McTaggart, and to a lesser extent W. R. Sorley. The only work published during his lifetime—the first part of his Exploratio Philosophica (1865), which Venn found “admirable and suggestive”—contained rough notes toward an idealism developed, for the most part, by criticizing the positions of others, ranging from Kant, Hegel, and Ferrier to Locke and Mill.96 At the core stood the idea that philosophy should take as its given or basic starting point human consciousness of reality—rather than observations or external reality—without thereby falling into the trap of solipsism. Grote’s influence on British idealism, in general, and Cambridge philosophy, more specifically, is notoriously hard to discern. One reason is that Grote himself apparently never sought reputation as a philosopher, being upheld merely by the belief, adopted from his friend Robert Leslie Ellis, that “things were worth thinking about, that thought was worth effort” in and of itself.97 Perhaps the main reason, however, is that Grote’s thought, which he only just began to systematize and put on paper in the last few years before his death in 1866, had significance only for the small group of members of the Grote Club, through whom it passed and was transformed, often without a clear trace of its origin. Sidgwick, particularly in the context of his criticism of utilitarianism, allegedly “learnt more from Grote than he was willing to admit.”98 Venn would later confirm this in a letter to Leslie Stephen, where he drew a connection between Grote and Sidgwick’s mature, antidogmatic approach to positivism.99 Although the extent of this influence is largely a matter of speculation, its existence gains prominence in light of the observation that Grote was the first example of the “Cambridge spirit,” which culminated in G. E. Moore, and that Grote’s “conversational, informal, italicised style, his acute, particularised, but not scholarly criticism, and his emphasis on ‘the language of the ordinary men’” were all prophetic of Moore’s work.100 Sidgwick—pupil of Grote, and teacher of Moore—was the intermediate figure here. Grote’s spirit would be evident in Venn’s writings too, not only in his sporadic use of terminology invented by Grote (“phenomenalism,” “notionalism”) but also, for example, in his penchant for subtle criticism and synthesis and in his respect for ordinary thinking and everyday language. The personal example of Grote made a lasting impression on Venn, who wrote to Mayor upon Grote’s death in August 1866 that “the last letter I had from him was . . . full of sympathy & encouragement, as everything that came from him.”101

About a year after the publication of his “Science of History” in May 1862, Venn had begun to put together rough notes on a variety of topics, ranging from Comte’s and Mill’s views on social science, to Buckle’s statistical fatalism and historical determinism, and George Boole’s and Augustus De Morgan’s work on probability theory. The fundamental idea of what would become his first book, The Logic of Chance—namely that the statistical probability of an event did not presuppose or say anything about this event (be it a physical object or a human being) qua individual but only qua member of a group of similar events—had come to him a few years earlier, on a summer’s day at Penmaenmawr in 1858. Between 1863 and 1865 Venn used his moral sciences lectures to further flesh out the idea, but it was at the Grote Club that The Logic of Chance really took shape. On several occasions, Venn read drafts of chapters, the discussions of which were of the “utmost use in suggesting the ideas & working them out.”102 The book itself would be “full of memories of the meetings at Trumpington,” and, as Venn wrote in his letter to Mayor in 1866, “the last time I saw Professor Grote—about a month or so before his death—was to talk with him about one of the chapters which he had looked over when in type.”103

A few years later, Venn would also join the Eranus Society, an interdisciplinary discussion group officially founded by three Cambridge theologians and future bishops—Brooke F. Westcott, J. B. Lightfoot, and F. J. A. Hort—but allegedly initiated by Sidgwick with the purpose of discovering what Lightfoot really thought about the relation between science and religion.104 It was not intended to be theological, however; on the contrary, as Sidgwick explained, much like the Grote Club, its aim was to provide scholars of different subjects a regular opportunity for a more serious exchange of ideas than ordinary social gatherings allowed.105 The Grote Club was much more important for Venn’s philosophical education, but his membership of the Eranus Society did make him part of a select group of some of the great minds in Cambridge committed to making research more important at their alma mater. It had only a dozen members, including Seeley (Regius Professor of Modern History), James Clerk Maxwell (Cavendish Professor of Physics), Henry Jackson (Regius Professor of Greek), Frederic W. Maitland (Venn’s pupil and later Downing Professor of the Laws of England), Sir George Darwin (one of Charles Darwin’s sons who in 1883 became Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy), and George Gabriel Stokes (Lucasian Professor of Mathematics). The meetings were held some six times a year on Tuesday evenings at the house or rooms of one of the members, where the host had the duty of reading a nontechnical paper on a specialized or general topic as an introduction to the discussion.106 Despite the informal character of the society, some members printed a title and outline of their paper in advance of the meeting and shared well thought out work in progress. Maxwell, for example, presented his famous essay “Free Will and Science” at a meeting held on 11 February 1873.107

Clubs and societies like the Grote Club and Eranus Society offered Venn and other Cambridge dons a platform for free and open discussion, whatever their orientation or background. As Venn would recall around the turn of the century, this was an experience “rarer . . . than many would now believe.”108 Within a university that emphasized (an increasing number of) tripos examinations, and the teaching of the skills and knowledge to pass through them, these groups also played an important role in stimulating new and original research. It was through their channels of conversation, friendship, socialization, and linking figures like Venn that they contributed their share to the creation of the local background of what is today known as Cambridge analytic philosophy.

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The 1860s were a period of transition for Venn. After 1862, he became part of the mid-Victorian generation of Cambridge dons in whose careers might be seen the process of a larger shift in academic expectations and in teaching and learning in Britain.109 Venn was the product of the unreformed university whose BA curriculum traced back to the genius of Newton. Like so many other men, Venn had come up to Cambridge as the son of a clergyman whose fellowship was expected to lead to a college living. But instead he chose to return to Cambridge and to settle there, becoming an early promotor of the Moral Sciences Tripos, one of the first Caian fellows to marry, and a member of prominent intellectual circles. The Moral Sciences Tripos itself had marked a major step toward a more specialized, professional, and secular university curriculum. Venn, working alongside colleagues such as Sidgwick and Marshall, introduced new topics at Cambridge and taught the first generations of academic specialists in logic, who in time would create and form the core of Cambridge analytic philosophy.

A tension would eventually emerge between Venn’s academic identity and his religious commitment to Evangelicalism. During the late 1860s, he witnessed up close how friends and colleagues, prompted by religious doubts, resigned their Cambridge fellowships because they could no longer uphold the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. Venn hesitated. Until 1883, he would remain both a don and a clergyman.

6

Probability

(1866)

The 1860s were marked by two major events in Venn’s academic life: the appointment to a moral sciences teaching post at Cambridge and the publication of The Logic of Chance (1866), the first and most influential of his three books on logic. Rather than a sudden development in his identity, these events propelled a gradual process in which Venn came to establish himself as one of Britain’s most prominent logicians, teaching a new generation of moral sciences students (including J. Neville Keynes and W. E. Johnson) and writing an oeuvre that shaped the complex, and hence oft-neglected, period in British logic and Cambridge philosophy between the 1860s and 1890s.

We have seen that Venn became very active in the reform of the Moral Sciences Tripos in the 1860s. Among other things, he for many years taught the Elementary Logic course, and he would also introduce new logical topics into the curriculum, as part of the course on advanced logic. It was in this context that Venn wrote his textbooks, the main ideas of which were often developed in his lectures, at first to members of his own college and later to moral sciences students generally in the university. Venn’s Logic of Chance, which appeared in three editions between 1866 and 1888, dealt with probability theory, covering its foundations, scope, and application to moral and social science. Venn showed that the subject was not merely mathematical but also philosophical: it touched on topics standing at the heart of the work of the religious philosophers Joseph Butler and William Paley and that of the scientific methodologists Whewell and Mill. The Logic of Chance was soon added to the reading list for moral sciences students, and it almost single-handedly put probability on the philosophical agenda at Cambridge, where it would eventually be pursued by early twentieth-century analytic philosophers, including W. E. Johnson, C. D. Broad, and Frank Ramsey.

This chapter examines the origins, content, and legacy of Venn’s Logic of Chance. Its focus lies on Venn’s development of the so-called frequency view of probability as a rival to the classical view of the Continental mathematicians. The next chapter will turn to its bearing on broader religious topics, including testimony, miracles, and, especially, the nature of belief, which Venn would place at the core of his Hulsean Lectures for 1869.

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Venn’s Logic of Chance is remembered today as the first-ever systematic account of the so-called frequency theory of probability, which says that the probability of an event is its relative frequency in a large number of observations or trials: it is the number of times it occurs divided by the total number of possible events. This simple idea was not new—it can be traced back to Aristotle, had been discussed by G. W. Leibniz and Jacob Bernoulli, and was pioneered by Mill and Robert Leslie Ellis—but Venn turned it into a full-blown alternative to the Continental tradition that defined probability as a degree of belief. Throughout his four-hundred-page book, Venn wrestled heavily with the problem of a proper definition of frequentism (“How many observations are needed to know an event’s probability?” “What sort of events have probabilities?”) as well as with its wide-ranging implications. Some of Venn’s contemporaries, John Maynard Keynes among others, already observed that the position defended in The Logic of Chance had rather peculiar features. One is that it seems to give up the idea that probability is, as Butler famously wrote in his Analogy of Religion (1736), the very guide to life: rather, probability as frequency does not inform rational decisions about single, contingent events. Another is that it holds that probability theory is only concerned with statistical frequencies, not minding that this excludes large portions of what traditionally belonged to the theory (including famous mathematical theorems). For all the problematic aspects of his own theory—and of frequentism in general—Venn may be credited for having acknowledged and made explicit many of them before others did over the course of the twentieth century.

The Logic of Chance was much more than the dry, logical textbook that posterity has made of it. The book was an attempt to show that probability could not simply be abandoned to the mathematicians, for as a new branch of philosophy it bore heavily on the sources, nature, and limits of human knowledge as well as on the underlying nature and character of reality. Venn’s systematic, though nonmathematical, discussion of probability offered a highly spirited contribution to some of the Victorian era’s most fundamental questions about the tension between science and religion, ranging from whether the universe had been constructed by an intelligent designer to whether fixed causal laws denied freedom of will. With its publication in 1866, the thirty-three-year-old Venn not only advanced the heterogeneous British tradition—started by De Morgan and Mill and resumed by Keynes and Frank Ramsey—which views probability purely in terms of logic. He also continued several major academic debates in Britain from the first half of the nineteenth century, embracing topics such as scientific method; the epistemological, religious, and social implications of science; and the moral and intellectual character of its practitioners. The first of these debates started as early as in the 1810s and 1820s, with the introduction of Continental mathematics into Britain, in particular into the tripos examination at Cambridge, and was taken up again in the 1830s and 1840s, when probability theory was imported from the Continent.1 At its core stood the question, separating the followers of Bacon’s rules from the advocates of Newton’s practice, whether science was inductive or deductive, whether it developed primarily through observations of facts or also through more or less probable hypotheses, and, ultimately, whether or not scientific knowledge could be mathematized. Within a Victorian culture steeped in natural theology, and anti-French sentiments, these issues had both an epistemological and a religious significance: induction tended to be seen as a national heritage valued for its religious power, whereas deduction was dismissed for leading to atheism. Venn stood in the tradition of “Baconians,” and his Logic of Chance contributed to their debate about the true logic of inductive scientific reasoning, waged in John Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse (1830), Whewell’s History and Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1837 and 1840); and Mill’s System of Logic (1843). Following Mill’s analysis in the first edition of A System of Logic, Venn presented the frequency view as the only view of probability compatible with the idea that all knowledge is inductive. What he shared with the Baconians, and what set him apart from the “Newtonians” Augustus De Morgan and William Stanley Jevons was his reluctance to apply probability to induction and to accept that every inductive inference—and, hence, knowledge as such—is always merely probable. Venn was one of the last in a long line of British thinkers according to whom the process of induction was unamenable to formal mathematical rules and the conclusions of inductive scientific inferences were certain. At the same time, he was one of the first followers of Mill to acknowledge that experience and observation alone did not provide a sufficient foundation for knowledge. “The substructure of our convictions,” wrote Venn in The Logic of Chance, “is not so much to be compared to the solid foundations of an ordinary building as to the piles of the houses of Rotterdam which rest somehow in a deep bed of soft mud.”2

Taken together, Venn’s Logic of Chance, his first book, shaped and was shaped by the intellectual atmosphere in which it was written, one highly optimistic about the promises of science, both natural and social, and deeply concerned about its ramifications.

Origins

Venn completed the manuscript of The Logic of Chance at the beginning of 1866. The book had been several years in the making. Its origins traced back to 1858, when Venn had hit on Buckle’s statement about “the impossibility of checking [i.e., ‘counteracting’] the statistical regularity of human actions.”3 Because Venn lacked the knowledge to make sense of Buckle’s project—whether it was the application of probability theory to history or the use of Quetelet’s statistical regularities to prove the existence of laws governing the human world—he had written to his old coach Todhunter to ask for advice. Among the books that Todhunter, who at the time was writing his History of the Mathematical Theory of Probability, recommended was Augustus De Morgan’s Essay on Probabilities (1838)—a “most helpful” book that did much to introduce into Britain the mathematical work on probability of Pierre-Simon Laplace and Siméon Denis Poisson as well as their subjective view of probabilities as degrees of belief.4 The other work that Todhunter mentioned was George Boole’s Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854), in which Boole argued that the foundations of probability, created by the Continental mathematicians, needed to be reformulated in terms of his own algebra of logic in order to develop it into a general theory of chance events. Venn immediately read this “remarkable” book, but it would be only after a third or fourth study, at the end of the 1870s, that he finally came to grips with it.5 In 1858, Venn also worked his way through Book III (“Of Induction”) and Book VI (“On the Logic of the Moral Sciences”) of Mill’s System of Logic. This provided him with the general logical outlook, the so-called material view of logic, that he needed to “force into clearness” his own “vague reflections,” to “bring them into connection,” and to rest them on a “firmer basis.”6 Buckle, Quetelet, De Morgan, Boole, Laplace, Poisson, and Mill—these were, apart from Butler and Paley, almost the only names that figured in The Logic of Chance, and it was around their work that the book revolved.

Over the course of 1865, Venn had read and discussed drafts of chapters at meetings of the Grote Club. He spent most of 1866 passing The Logic of Chance through the press, helped by Todhunter, Sidgwick, and his own father, who all carefully went through the proof sheets. Todhunter and Sidgwick made suggestions and pointed out errors; Henry Venn improved the clarity of some of the arguments and gave advice for the financial negotiations with Macmillan, the London publisher. Around the beginning of May 1866, having read several proof sheets, he wrote to his son to compliment him: “Had the whole work been in my hands I should have read it through without stopping. I think it is so well done & so important that I am perhaps too anxious that it should be worked up to perfection and clearness.”7 Venn’s Logic of Chance appeared in October 1866 in a circulation of 750 copies. Some ten years later these would be sold out, justifying a second edition but leaving Venn with a net loss of £10.

The underlying inspiration of The Logic of Chance came from themes already taken up in “Science of History” (1862). That paper had contributed to the discussion, central to the work of Comte, Mill, Buckle, and Quetelet, about the possibility of social science and the significance of social laws, discoverable from statistical regularities, for its establishment. Venn’s main concern had been to disprove both the fatalism—the “insignificance of individual efforts in the face of great social laws”—and the historical determinism speaking from Buckle’s History of Civilization in England and Quetelet’s Treatise on Man.8 There were no ironclad laws that governed the historical development of society, and fatalism simply did not make sense from the perspective of daily life. This same outlook ran through all chapters of The Logic of Chance, often implicitly but at times explicitly.

Venn’s direct motivation in writing the book was twofold. The first was to establish probability theory as a philosophical subject, in Britain at large but particularly at Cambridge, where it had been taught since the turn of the century as a rather narrow mathematical topic included in the Mathematical Tripos. Venn even wished to show that, the genius of Laplace notwithstanding, probability theory was not a branch of mathematics at all, but a branch of logic, which he, following Mill, understood as the “science of evidence,” making only occasional use of mathematics. Having long been abandoned to pure mathematicians who cared but little for philosophical nuance, what was now needed was an examination of the simple but fundamental question: What is probability? De Morgan had recently taken up this question, but Venn disagreed not merely with his answer—that probabilities are degrees of belief—but even with the outlook from which this answer was given—the conceptualist view of logic, which says that logic, including probability, deals with “the laws of our minds in thinking about things.” Venn instead agreed with Mill’s material view, according to which logic—inductive, deductive, and probable—concerned the laws of inference about things. From this outlook, it was natural for Mill to have adopted the frequency view of probability, which Venn considered to be the correct view. Venn’s second motivation in writing his book was that Mill’s treatment of the subject in A System of Logic was “very brief” and too much devoted to “one or two special examples.”9 Mill had begun his Book III, chapter 18 (“On the Calculation of Chances”) by recalling Laplace’s classical definition of probability as having reference partly to our ignorance and partly to our knowledge.10 Laplace’s requirement that, in order to calculate probabilities, events should be mutually exclusive and exhaustive and equally possible was found by Mill to be entirely unsatisfactory: “To be able to pronounce two events equally probable, it is not enough that we should know that one or the other must happen, and should have no ground for conjecturing which. Experience must have shown that the two events are of equally frequent occurrence.”11 Venn never mentioned that already three years later, Mill had changed his mind—largely owing to the intervention of John Herschel—and withdrawn his criticism of Laplace in the second edition of A System of Logic of 1846. Throughout all the editions of The Logic of Chance, Venn professed a commitment to Mill’s original frequentism, of which the book was said to provide the first full-length exposition: it showed that the foundations, scope, and legitimate applications of probability theory reduced to statistical frequencies of events. Indeed, The Logic of Chance would later receive praise, for example from J. M. Keynes, because “there is no mystery about it—no new indefinable, no appeals to intuition.”12 Even today the view of probability most widely accepted among working scientists is that of frequentism. The book’s real mystery, however, is that the position it ends up with—sometimes called hypothetical frequentism—actually defines probability as a counterfactual. This explains why other critics, such as Jevons and Francis Herbert Bradley, would dismiss The Logic of Chance as pure metaphysics.

The Logic of Chance

The Logic of Chance—a work “to be read by every thinking man” according to the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce—would earn Venn a place in the history of probability theory as a pioneer of the frequency theory and made him the “father of probability” at Cambridge.13 Owing to criticism of the structure of the first edition (1866) as “deficient and awkward,” the second (1876) and third (1888) editions would see major changes in the arrangement of chapters and many omissions and additions—most of which were due to growing doubts about Mill’s general outlook on logic and an increasing interest in the scientific applications of probability and the development of statistics as an independent field of study.14 For example, in the later editions of the book Venn would include discussions of laws of error and randomness and temper his polemical disdain for mathematical theorems, such as the rule of succession. At the same time, Venn’s overarching view on probability as relative frequency remained essentially unchanged, although the growing need to provide technical definitions, for example of the notion of “series” and their “limit,” would at times confront him with fundamental challenges.

The book came in three parts.15 Part 1 gave the “physical foundations” of probability theory—probability is relative frequency in a suitably long series of events—and part 2, the “logical superstructure” established on these foundations. Part 3 provided a critical discussion of some of the applications of probability theory. Together, the first two parts show that in The Logic of Chance probability is understood as a specific kind of logic, one grounded on external observations of statistical “series,” expressed in the form of “proportional propositions,” and concerned with finding out what valid inferences can be made from them. Throughout the book, Venn silently followed a view of the relation of probability logic to both deductive and inductive logic, which he would not flesh out until the 1870s and 1880s. At its core stood the idea, taken from Mill, that all genuine reasoning is inductive reasoning: hence, the universal propositions of traditional syllogistic logic, for example, are inductive generalizations from particular propositions about external observations. It was to this logical framework that Venn added another category, so to speak: that of probability statements. Venn believed that, like universal propositions (“All men are mortal”), proportional propositions (“Nine men out of ten live to forty”) were inductive generalizations from experience. If such generalizations contained universal propositions they belonged to syllogistic logic, if they contained proportional propositions to the logic of probability. Venn used part 3 to show that on the basis of the position put forward in part 1 and part 2 of the book, many commonly accepted problems and applications had to be excluded from probability theory. These ranged from the credibility of testimony and of extraordinary stories about miracles to design arguments and the sociological study of laws of human conduct. The central message was that, insofar as probability could not be applied to any of these problems, the theory had no implications for our view of either the nature of reality or that of the freedom of human will. It would be one of the main criticisms leveled against the first edition of The Logic of Chance: its identification of probability with statistical frequencies was too narrow to do justice to the usefulness and richness of probabilities, both in science and in everyday life. The criticism must have bothered Venn, for in the second and third editions it was part 3 that showed the most significant changes.

The Foundations of Probability

The first part of The Logic of Chance approached probability theory from the “objective side,” fleshing out, in some one hundred pages, what it means to say that probability is relative frequency in a suitable long series of events. To this end, all four of its chapters discussed aspects of what Venn held to be the foundations of the theory: a certain kind of series obtained by experience that combines aggregate regularity with individual irregularity.

The most obvious cases in point were, of course, the statistical regularities of social, moral, and vital phenomena that circulated widely in Britain owing to their popularization by Buckle and Quetelet. Venn recognized their importance, which he underlined with a stanza from Tennyson’s In Memoriam, appearing as the epigraph to The Logic of Chance: “So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life.” As the arch-Victorian poem, which Venn knew by heart, continued: “That I, considering everywhere, Her secret meaning in her deeds, And finding that of fifty seeds, She often brings but one to bear.” Tennyson’s was a play on the contrasting destinies of the individual and the type: whereas individual lives flourished and vanished in “utterly inexplicable and erratic ways,” their type had a permanence captured by a regularity—the average survival rate—which emerged from a comparison of the aggregate or long-run frequencies of births, lives, and deaths. Following the “avalanche of printed numbers,” Tennyson accepted that averages “were all that nature offered by way of an explanation of the death of a loved one.”16

Venn, however, was highly critical of the widespread statistical enthusiasm to which Tennyson’s In Memoriam gave poetic expression. Despite the obvious appeal of statistical regularities, Venn, belonging to a new generation of statistical thinkers who put much greater emphasis on individual variability and statistical uncertainty, insisted that gradual order, uniformity, or regularity was not “indefinite” and its “approach to perfection” not unlimited.17 Venn referred to Darwin’s theory of evolution as an argument for what has been called a historicist or evolutionary view of nature and society:

The type itself, if we regard it for a long time, changes and then vanished and is succeeded by others. So in Probability; that uniformity which is found in the long run, offering so great a contrast to the individual disorder, though durable is not everlasting. Keep on watching it long enough, and it will be found almost invariably to fluctuate, and in time may prove as utterly irreducible to rule, and therefore as incapable of prediction, as the individual cases themselves.18

Venn next drew an all-important distinction between two different kinds of series: natural series (the average duration of life, the annual deaths from smallpox, etc.), whose uniformities fluctuated, and artificial series (fair cards, dice, etc.), whose uniformities were fixed. These two series are initially completely identical but eventually begin to diverge, since only natural series will start to fluctuate. The problem as Venn saw it was that it is possible to draw valid inferences only about events with a fixed, long-run relative frequency. Hence, if probability wants to be more than a theory of combinations and permutations about dice, the natural series need to be brought “into a shape fit for calculation.”19

The series we actually meet with show a changeable type, and the individuals of them will sometimes transgress their licensed irregularity. They have to be pruned a little into shape, as natural objects always have before they are capable of being accurately reasoned about. The form in which the series emerges is that of a series with a fixed type, and with its unwarranted irregularities omitted. This imaginary or ideal series is the basis of our [inferences].20

Venn cautioned that this step was not at odds with the idea that probability is “a science of inference about real things.”21 Throughout the book, the only remedy offered, however, was that the substitution should be “as little arbitrary” as possible, which meant that the validity of inferences made about such series will always depend on their “close agreement” with the observed natural series.22

There were other, even larger problems, lingering in the background. To pin down the notion of probability as relative frequency, Venn also faced the issue of how long the series—whether artificial or substituted—should be. If a die is tossed 10 times and comes up 3, 3, 7, 2, 5, 4, 7, 3, 6, 3, the probability of getting a three when tossing a die cannot simply be 4/10. What number of times is enough? The only possible answer is that an infinite number of tosses is needed, and this is the conclusion that Venn settled on. Probability is the fixed limit of the relative frequency as the number of observations or trials goes to infinity—and “it is with this limit that we are concerned in . . . Probability.”23 This move to limiting relative frequency would later, in the twentieth century, be shown to raise some thorny mathematical problems. The main issue for Venn was that the notion of infinity of course did not sit well with the material, or objective, view of logic. It was a bullet he was prepared to bite.

Another problem concerned the question what kind of events enter into a series and can thus be said to have a probability. For example, in the case of throwing dice, some symmetric and some oddly shaped, it is not possible to take a certain sequence of throws and use this to define probabilities. What is needed is the same die, thrown again and again in the same way. But, as Venn observed, when throwing the same die again and again, it will become worn, its edges and corners will round off; it will eventually be a different die. What is needed is a sequence of throws in which everything remains the same, so that it is possible to say that these are all throws of the same kind. This is not only impossible in the real world; it is also in conflict with the earlier requirement of an infinite sequence of trials. The uncomfortable position that Venn arrived at was that of hypothetical relative frequentism, which defines probability as a counterfactual: the probability of an event is the limiting relative frequency that it would have if it would appear an infinite number of times with no changes in any of the relevant circumstances. It is the central unasked and unanswered question of The Logic of Chance: what exactly is the connection of the hypothetical world to the actual world, and, if none, what is it exactly that gives frequentism its this-worldly appeal as compared to the traditional subjective view?

Against Classical Probability Theory

Venn next criticized and distanced his new frequency view from the classical theory of probability, running from Pascal through Laplace and De Morgan. Almost all his arguments were concentrated around the slightly misleading fact that the Continental mathematicians had built their theory on paradigmatic examples of cards and dice.24 This had not only infected the theory with an “a priori tendency,” but it had also given rise to the idea that, since artificial and natural series were essentially the same, it was possible to draw conclusions and make predictions about natural phenomena from purely mathematical rules.25

Venn started from the simple example of tossing a coin twice, in which case it is known that there are four possible events and that these occur, in the long run, equally often. The classical theory captured this case by saying that the four events were a priori equally likely. But, Venn asked, what is the meaning of “equally likely”? An answer can be sought either in the state of the mind of the observer—that is, in the belief in the occurrence of the events being equal—or in some characteristic of the things observed—that is, in the events actually occurring with equal frequency in the long run. Venn’s main argument in favor of the second reply was that the attempt to make sense of the notion of “equally likely events” depended on tacit restrictions: “The moment we begin to enquire seriously whether the penny will really do what is expected of it, we shall find that restrictions have to be introduced. In the first place the penny must be an ideal one, with its sides equal and fair. . . . These tacit restrictions on the a priori plan are really nothing else than a mode of securing an experimental result.”26 These were the exact same conditions that Venn himself needed for his own definition of frequentism. Unlike the Continental mathematicians, Venn told himself for comfort, he at least said that probability theory should in principle be grounded on the “potential experience” of the real world rather on the attempt to somehow obtain knowledge from ignorance.27 Indeed, like Mill, Ellis, and even Boole before him, Venn ridiculed the traditional use of a so-called uniform prior based on the “principle of indifference,” the notorious idea that where there is no reason to favor one outcome or hypothesis over another, it is allowed to assign each the same probability (“equiprobability”).

The notion of “equiprobable” cases had some intuitive grounding in cases of artificial series, but the notion had also been applied to natural cases, such as comets and stars. This pointed to a confusion central to the entire tradition of classical probability theory: its tacit attempt to treat natural series as artificial series. For example, as Laplace wrote about the overwhelming regularity of natural events: “it is soon perceived that this regularity is nothing but the development of the respective probabilities of the simple events, which ought to occur more frequently according as they are more probable.”28 When made about artificial series, this remark would mean merely that the constitution of the object was such that the result could be anticipated and that experience would eventually justify the anticipation. When made about natural series, on the other hand, the remark, as Venn argued, made no sense:

Amidst the irregularity of individual births, we find that in the long run the male children are to the female in about the proportion of 106 to 100. Now when we are told that there is nothing in this but the “development of their respective probabilities”, what is there in this sentence but a somewhat pretentious restatement of the fact just asserted? The probability is nothing but that proportion, and is derived from statistics alone; in the above remark the attempt seems made to invert this process, and to derive the sequence of events from a numerical statement about the very events themselves.29

The classical probabilists allegedly believed that the probability in question referred, not to the numerical proportion of male and female births, but to a fact in human constitution on which this proportion somehow depended. What they seemed to suggest was that “just as there was a relation of equality between the two sides of the penny,” so there may be “something in our bodies in the proportion of 106 to 100 which produces the statistical result.”30 When this “something” would be found, the statistical frequency of both artificial and natural series could be known and calculated beforehand.31 Here, Venn referred to Jacob Bernoulli’s famous theorem—the law of large numbers from his Ars Conjectandi (1713)—which, in Venn own words, said that in the long run all events will tend to occur with a frequency proportional to their objective probabilities. “This theorem of Bernoulli seems to me one of the last remaining relics of Realism, which after being banished elsewhere still manages to linger in the remote province of Probability”:

It is an illustration of the inveterate tendency to objectify our conceptions even in cases where the conceptions had no right to exist at all. A uniformity is observed; sometimes, as in games of chance, it is found to be so connected with the physical constitution of the bodies employed as to be capable of being inferred beforehand . . . ; this constitution is then converted into an “objective probability”, supposed to develop somehow into the sequence which exhibits the uniformity. Finally, this very questionable objective probability is assumed to exist . . . in all the cases in which uniformity is observed, however little resemblance there may be between these and games of chance.32

Venn’s frequentism made use of idealization: a real series was substituted for an ideal series. At the same time, Bernoulli’s theorem was dismissed on the grounds that its presuppositions did not match with physical reality. The key difference, however, was that whereas the classical probabilists believed that physical series really had a fixed, unchangeable type—which was the “development of the probabilities” of actual things—Venn himself acknowledged that his ideal series was a mere fiction, to be kept “in as close conformity with the facts” as possible.33

Venn’s criticism of Bernoulli is noteworthy for two reasons: first, since frequentism is commonly referred to as an “objective” view of probability. For Venn, however, there are no objective probabilities, no chances, in the world, only statistical frequencies; and second, because in the law of large numbers is sometimes recognized Venn’s starting point, while none of the probabilities occurring in it (such as those found on single trial) are legitimate according to Venn’s frequentism.

The first edition of The Logic of Chance made essentially the same point about Quetelet’s distinction in his Letters on Probability (1846) between a real average (moyenne) and an arithmetical average (moyenne arithmétique) or “mean.” Whereas the real average has an existence in reality, the arithmetical average is a number referring to something fictional, as it averages quantities over a group of homogeneous objects. For example, averaging different measurements of different houses in the same street leads to the height of a fictional house. The “real average” would instead gradually converge to the actual height of the house and the measurement deviations would tend to distribute themselves to the error law (“normal distribution” or “bell-shaped curve”) because they are merely accidental. Venn’s criticism of Quetelet’s use of the error law was quite similar to that of Bernoulli’s law of large numbers:

For the measurements of the height of a house, are afterwards introduced those of the height of a man. This is all very well; but when, on comparing the group which these attempted measures compose, we find that they correspond roughly to the actual heights of a large number of different men taken at random, and go on to assume, as M. Quetelet does, that these actual heights must be in some way modelled on a type common to all: what is this but the reappearance of the realistic doctrine?34

What Venn found fault with was Quetelet’s universal application of the error law—first developed by Carl Friedrich Gauss and Laplace as the law governing the distribution of errors from true values in astronomical observations—not only to physical but also to human phenomena. Quetelet believed that all living human beings were flawed replicates of the “average man” and that variations from this type were accidental in much the same sense that measurement errors were.

Despite his philosophical criticism, Venn was fascinated by Quetelet’s work. It does not seem too much to say that in Quetelet Venn found the main inspiration for rewriting his Logic of Chance for its second and third editions—where the discussion of probability was much more quantitative, including mathematical-statistical topics such as randomness, averaging, and different laws of error. Importantly, in the 1876 and 1888 editions Venn still maintained that probability was a “material science which employs mathematics” and not “a formal one which consists of nothing but mathematics.”35 The mathematical analysis of statistical data, however, would become Venn’s main interest in the last few years of his logical career. During the late 1880s, Venn briefly collaborated with Francis Galton to move beyond “Quetelismus,” using Quetelet’s work, not to get rid of variation, but as a tool for understanding its nature and effects.36

The Logic of Probability

With the rather problematic notion of probability as limiting relative frequency on the table, the next step was to turn from the objective or physical (or, in actual fact, the ideal or imaginary) to the subjective or logical side of the theory. Part 2 of The Logic of Chance asked: “What is to be done with this series?” and “How is it to be employed as a means of making inferences?” Venn answered these questions by discussing whether and, if so, how it was possible to make both formal—immediate and syllogistic—inferences and inductive inferences about probability series.

It is yet another oddity of the book: Venn wants nothing to do with the subjective view of probability—which views it as the measurement of partial belief—but is preoccupied with the task of determining what beliefs someone can and may have about probability statements. This points to an important fact about The Logic of Chance: it offers a logic of probability, not a probability logic. Rather than speaking of the probability of the truth of the proposition asserting the occurrence of an event, as De Morgan and Boole did and Keynes would do, it said that statistical frequencies, arrived at by observation, could be expressed as a proportional proposition.37 Indeed, at one point Venn explicitly took issue with De Morgan’s notion of probable inference, which said probability should study “the effect which partial belief of the premises produces with respect to the conclusion.”38 What Venn did instead was to introduce probability into Mill’s material system of logic, without changing its fundamental idea that inference is from particulars to particulars and that this process of inductive reasoning itself is essentially sound and infallible.

The first kind of inferences that Venn discussed corresponded to what is known in traditional syllogistic logic as immediate inferences, in which particular propositions (“This man is mortal”) are inferred from the general propositions that include them (“All men are mortal”). Within probability theory this took the form of inferring particular propositions from general proportional propositions of the statistical kind: “Given that nine men out of ten live to forty, what can be said about the prospect of any particular man?” A major problem arose almost immediately, for what this question asks is to say something about single cases, about individual events, which are excluded from the theory. At the same time, Venn could not but admit that in daily life people constantly seem to entertain degrees of belief, and to ascribe probabilities, to individual events. Given his respect for everyday language (“I feel almost sure,” “I do not feel quite certain,” etc.), it was important to him to take this seriously, and to see how probability as frequency can inform these degrees of belief. His starting point was to contrast partial belief with full belief. Here, the truth of belief of a statement can be checked simply by appealing to the facts. This is impossible, however, in the case of partial belief in any single contingent event. Venn gives another coin example: “I am about to toss one up, and I therefore half-believe . . . that it will give head. Now it seems to be overlooked that if we appeal to the event . . . our belief must inevitably be wrong [for] the thing must either happen or not happen; . . . there is no third alternative. But whichever way it occurs, our half-belief . . . must be wrong. If head does come, I am wrong in not having expected it enough. . . . If it does not happen, I am equally wrong in having expected it too much.”39 This same difficulty occurs in every case in which someone tries to justify partial belief in a single contingent event. One possible answer—seemingly the only one available to Venn—is that what someone really means by saying that he or she half believes in the occurrence of head is to express the conviction that head will happen on the average every other time. More generally, if an event can be referred to the appropriate series, it is possible to assign a probability to it, thereby justifying the degree of belief. This is not the end of the story, however. Venn acknowledged that daily life constantly forces us to make rational choices about unrepeatable events, which simply cannot be referred to a series. Venn’s strikingly pragmatist proposal for such cases was to justify degrees of belief in terms of the readiness to act on its truth, that is, in terms of the kind of conduct that results from it. “There can be no alteration in the belief without a possible alteration in the conduct, nor anything in the conduct which is not connected with something in the belief.”40 Whatever else may be implied in having a belief—psychologically speaking—it seems clear—philosophically speaking—that in all cases we are ready to stake our conduct on it. Similarly, what we believe might best be inferred from what we do, since our actions are nothing else than the “translation into practice” of our beliefs.41 It is not in betting only, but in all circumstances, that “numerical associations” thus become connected with events, and it is in consequence of this fact that we act unhesitatingly even when dealing with single, unrepeatable events.42 “A die is going to be thrown up once, and once only,” Venn writes: “I bet 5 to 1 against ace, not . . . because I feel one-sixth part of certainty in the occurrence of ace; but because I know that such conduct would be justified in the long run of such cases.”43 We apply to an individual event the same rule that we should apply when we would know the relative frequency with which an event occurs. Hence, our conduct is the same in these two cases.

Venn’s solution, reproduced verbatim in the second and third editions, contrasts interestingly with the one provided by C. S. Peirce, who greatly admired The Logic of Chance. Like Venn, Peirce believed that beliefs about single contingent events must always be justified somehow. His solution was the following. Since no individual can help him- or herself to the notion of an infinitely long run, which Peirce accepts to be standing at the core of the frequency theory, this person’s only option is to adopt the position of the ideal thinker who reasons from the social perspective of an “indefinite community.” When doing so, the person knows that his or her probability assessments in single cases are justified because he or she sees that, “if everyone made them, then, in the long run, they would be correct.”44 Peirce is remembered as one of the founders of pragmatism. But it was Venn who, in this case, not anticipated but also offered a perhaps more pragmatist solution to single-case probabilities.

Having shown that there was an “intelligible sense” in which one might speak of the amount of belief in a proportional proposition, and justify that amount, Venn took up a second category of inferences: that of mediate or syllogistic inferences, which formed “the staple of ordinary logical treatises,” where one general proposition is inferred from another.45 Venn believed himself to be in a position to derive the formal rules of the probability calculus from his probability series: the addition and multiplication rules were said to follow from these series by the mere application of arithmetic. For example, the fact that if the chances of two incompatible events are respectively 1/m and 1/n, then the chance of one or other of them happening is 1/m + 1/n or m + n/mn means precisely the same when it is expressed in a statistical form. The “great body of formulae” found in the work of the classical probabilists were said to be “nothing else in reality than applications of [these] fundamental rules.”46 The reason for this bold claim was that, on Venn’s view, the famous probability theorems came in two classes: formal ones, whose mathematical formalism was just an abbreviation of arithmetical processes, and experimental ones resting on inductive generalizations. This distinction went hand in hand with the underlying criticism that many of the latter category had become associated with the former, so that “in popular estimation they have been blended into one system, of which all the separate [parts] are supposed to possess a similar origin and equal certainty.”47

The experimental rules were obviously of greater importance for Venn, because they concerned the use of proportional propositions for making new inductions, that is, for extending our knowledge from the observed to the unobserved. This possibility would demonstrate that probability is “a science of real inference about things” and not merely an “entirely formal or deductive science.”48 Venn’s discussion started with a criticism of the classical attempt to reduce induction to probabilistic terms. Venn argued that the notion of inverse probability (or the “probability of causes”)—used, for example, to reason from observed effects to their probable causes or from relative frequencies of the past occurrence of an event to its future probabilities—had to be abandoned.49 One reason was that it relied on the principle of indifference. Another was that, like direct probability, it should be based on statistical frequencies. Venn’s most notorious criticism was directed at Laplace’s rule of succession (a term coined by Venn), which is given as follows: “To find the chance of the recurrence of an event already observed, divide the number of times the event has been observed, increased by one, by the same number increased by two.”50 Venn offered several arguments against this rule (which Laplace himself had used to calculate that the probability of the sun to rise tomorrow was 1,826,214 to 1). Perhaps the most important one concerned its reliance on the “urn of nature” analogy: the idea that observing an event is like drawing a ball from a bag, whose probable mixture of balls can be determined from the results of the drawings.51 Or, in Venn’s own words:

A white ball has been drawn m times from a bag which contains any number . . . of balls each of which is white or black, find the chance of the next drawing also yielding a white ball. The answer is m +1/m + 2. Thus far mathematics. Then comes in the physical assumption that the universe may be likened to such a bag as the above, in the sense that the above rule may be applied to solve this question:—an event has been observed to happen m times in a certain way, find the chance that it will happen in that way next time.52

Venn illustrated this with examples from Laplace and De Morgan, concluding that the rule could not be taken seriously. It is impossible to extend our knowledge from the observed to the unobserved purely by means of the “manipulation of symbols.”53

But what, if any, is the proper connection between probability and induction, according to Venn’s frequentism? Following Mill, Venn held that induction could not be probabilized because probabilities themselves are founded on inductive generalizations of statistical facts. The only thing that probability could do was to see what conclusions can be drawn from such generalizations. When attempting to draw conclusions about things as yet unknown, for example about whether someone will live for ten years, the problem situation is as follows: “John Smith presents himself, how should we in this case set about obtaining series? In other words, how should we collect the appropriate statistics?”54 This is where the so-called reference class problem arose—the problem of finding those series that provide statistical relevance to the individual case.55 Every individual thing or event has an indefinite number of properties and therefore belongs to an indefinite number of different, not necessarily overlapping, series; to these series correspond certain proportional propositions, possibly more or less in conflict with one another, discovered by previous observations. The problem boiled down to making sure that John Smith was not referred to either a class that is too wide or a class that is too narrow. For example, approaching John Smith as an Englishman may be too general, whereas approaching him as a farmer from Suffolk will be too specific. “The more special the statistics the better,” Venn wrote, “but many of the attributes of any individual are so rare that to take them into account would be at variance with [the] fundamental position of our science, that we are properly only concerned with the averages of large numbers.”56 The notion of “natural kinds” (coined by Venn) seemed to offer a way out; knowing that John Smith is a man, which Venn took to be a natural kind, means that he is not referred to the class of “mammals” or that of “inhabitant of Suffolk,” except when that fact is deemed relevant. When the classes are not marked out by nature, the process is even more obviously arbitrary. But within Venn’s evolutionary framework, natural kinds presented him with a problem all on their own. “If the type were fixed we could not have too many statistics, but,” Venn added, “if it varies, our extra labour may be worse than wasted. The danger of stopping too soon is easily seen, but in avoiding it we must not fall into that of going on too long.”57

Venn was not able to determine when series were either too short or too long or too narrow or too wide to be informative. He could merely conclude that “the limits within which we collect our statistics are to a certain extent arbitrary; we must exercise our judgment in deciding where we will draw the line and what we will include within it.”58 There were two principles of guidance that Venn had to offer: “the more special the series the better; for, though not more right in the end, we shall thus be more nearly right all along,” and “if we try to make the series too special, we shall generally meet the practical objection arising from insufficient statistics.”59 The reviewers were not impressed.

Reception

The Logic of Chance went through three editions, was well received in the periodicals and journals of the time, and would appear on the reading list of students on both sides of the Atlantic, at Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Cambridge, England.60 “It met with very fair success,” Venn wrote, “considering that it was not, and never could have been regarded as, a textbook for any popular examination.”61 What probably meant most to him was a letter from 4 February 1868, in which his intellectual mentor Mill generously complimented him on his first book:

I am late in acknowledging the gift of your very valuable work “The Logic of Chance.” As I perceived at once, as well as heard from others who read it, it well deserves consecutive study. . . . I think your book very important both as a contribution to the theory of the subject, and as a corrective to prevalent errors. Your general mode of [dealing with] this class of questions is by far the best and most philosophical I have met with. . . . Your book is one of the highest compliments which . . . have been paid to mine; for I have scarcely met with any thinker who seems to have so completely assimilated the . . . thoughts and principles of my book. . . . [I] promise myself that when I have more time to [spend on] the subject, I shall have still [more] to learn from your book than I have yet learnt from it, and that at some future time it may help me to expand and improve . . . some points of my [System of] Logic.62

Despite these feats, The Logic of Chance did not have a wide following in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Peirce, who in 1867 wrote a highly favorable review of the book, was almost the sole exception.63 There would remain a curious distance separating Venn from later frequentists, such as Richard von Mises and Hans Reichenbach, who did not read him.64 At home, the new generation of British philosophers, logicians, and statisticians, such as F. H. Bradley, Francis Y. Edgeworth, William Stanley Jevons, W. E. Johnson, and J. M. Keynes, were familiar with the book but did not agree with its general view of probability.65 All read The Logic of Chance and immediately asked rather uncomfortable questions: Is there not more to probability than statistical frequency? What is empirical about limiting relative frequencies? Does probability really have no bearing on induction? Is the reference class problem or the problem of the single case, or both, fatal to frequentism? These are all philosophical issues. Venn may be credited for having made some of them explicit as early as in 1866. It is perhaps no surprise, however, that The Logic of Chance found a more favorable reception among men of science, such as Francis Galton. Even today the average scientist will give a frequentist answer when asked what probability is. Venn himself would eventually also turn away from foundational issues: whereas the first edition was original for grounding probability on statistical tables (“descriptive statistics”), the second and third editions of 1876 and 1888 focused more and more on statistical techniques (“inferential statistics”). Some of the central aspects of this work will be taken up in chapter 10.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Venn’s book has long gone unnoticed. The Logic of Chance earned a place in the history of probability as the first systematic account of frequentism, understood as the empiricist reaction against the Continental tradition. But at the core of the book stands a version of hypothetical frequentism, allegedly pioneered by von Mises. Venn himself saw no problem here; he never changed his mind about the foundations of probability and always felt that accepting imaginary series as mere fictions was enough to keep his theory this-worldly.

One of Venn’s fiercest critics, the prominent British Idealist F. H. Bradley, did recognize the problem. As he wrote in his 1883 Principles of Logic, The Logic of Chance was “much injured by a terrible piece of bad metaphysics. [Venn] has translated a mathematical idea into the world where it becomes an absurdity.”66 Venn’s central mistake was to have defined probability as infinite long-run relative frequency:

What is this “long run”? . . . Does it mean a finite time? Then the assertion is false. Does it mean a time which has no end, an infinite time? Then the assertion is nonsense. An infinite series is of course not possible [for] it could not be real. And to say that something will certainly happen under impossible conditions, is far removed from asserting its reality. . . . You toss a coin and, the chances being equal, if you only go on long enough, the number of heads and tails will be the same. But this is ridiculous. If I toss the coin until the numbers are equal, of course they will be equal.67

Bradley concluded that it was better to uphold the classical definition of probability as a degree of belief. Edgeworth was only slightly more sympathetic to the frequentist view.68 He thought that probability should be concerned with the statistical analysis of mass phenomena and that statistical uniformity should be the main standard for estimating degrees of probability. But Edgeworth was not prepared to identify probability with relative frequency or to abandon the mathematical theorems of classical authors like Laplace and Poisson. For example, he defended the principle of indifference and its use in cases of inverse reasoning.69 Edgeworth and Venn had a somewhat troubled personal relation. Venn would thank Edgeworth in the third edition of The Logic of Chance for his many oral and written discussions and for reading the proof sheets. At the same time, even though he thought highly of his contributions to statistics, Venn would not endorse Edgeworth’s induction into the Royal Society, favoring Karl Pearson instead. From the 1880s on, Edgeworth for his part would make increasingly hostile remarks about The Logic of Chance. An unsigned review of the 1888 edition, written for the Athenaeum, ridiculed Venn’s many volte-faces (particularly on “the” error law) and mathematical shortcomings.70

Keynes, in his Treatise on Probability of 1921, praised The Logic of Chance. He neglected hypothetical frequentism and lauded the frequency view as entirely empirical. Keynes’s main criticism was twofold: the book was too limited to provide a complete theory of probability—or even to add to the tradition of probability—and Venn himself had not always kept within its narrow limits. Venn’s central idea of identifying probability with statistical frequency not only implied a rejection of long-established applications (e.g., testimonies) and theorems (e.g., the rule of succession) but also excluded all other senses and judgments of probability. Indeed, Mill too felt that Venn might have gone too far in this respect, writing in his letter from 1868 that “you seem to go farther in rejecting the doctrines of mathematicians on the subject than even I do.”71 Keynes adopted a logical view of probability, too, but transformed it into a probability logic concerned not with the probability of events but with the probability of propositions; that is, with so-called probability relations between any two propositions, which determine the rational degree of belief in the one, given the other. Keynes also observed that Venn himself had needed recourse to other kinds of probabilities than statistical frequencies, particularly in the context of the reference class problem: “He [Venn] forgets that, when he comes to consider the practical use of statistical frequencies, he has to admit that an event may possess more than one frequency, and that we must decide which of these to prefer on extraneous grounds. The device, he says, must be to a great extent arbitrary, and there are no logical grounds of decision but would he deny that it is often reasonable to found our probability on one statistical frequency rather than on another?”72 Keynes’s alternative epistemological view of logical probability had been anticipated by his teacher W. E. Johnson, Venn’s former pupil. Johnson praised Venn for his rejection of the subjective view of probability but argued that in addition to Venn’s “class-fractional propositions” (“The fraction p of the whole class S is in the long run found to be P”) there was another alternative, which he called “probability propositions” (“The probability that this S is P is p”).73 Johnson’s point was that these propositions, which express the idea that probability is relative not to an individual but to a particular condition of knowledge, made up a third view different from Venn’s frequentism, but also not subjective.

Despite his criticism Keynes revered Venn. In 1921 Keynes sent a copy of his newly appearing book on probability to Venn along with a letter signed “in a spirit of piety to the Father of this subject in Cambridge” (see figure 6.1):

6.1 Letter from John Maynard Keynes to Venn, the “Father” of probability theory at Cambridge, 31 August 1921, GCA, Venn Papers, C49. Reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

It is now no less than 55 years since the appearance of your first edition; yet mine is the systematic Treatise on the Logic of the subject, next after yours, to be published from Cambridge; nor, so far as I know, has there been any such treatise in the meantime in the English language. Yours was nearly the first book on the subject that I read; and its stimulus to my mind was of course very great. So, whilst you are probably much too wise to read any more logic (as I hope I shall be in my old age), I beg your acceptance of this volume, the latest link in the very continuous chain (in spite of difference of opinion) of Cambridge thought.74

When Keynes wrote his letter, Venn’s logic days were long gone, and his tastes had developed in completely different directions. Keynes’s letter does provide tangible evidence of the existence of a Cambridge tradition established by Venn, thanks to whose efforts “the foundations and logical treatment of Probability” would be included in the schedule of subjects for the Moral Sciences Tripos in the 1870s.75 This tradition traces a long line running from Venn’s pupil W. E. Johnson and Alfred North Whitehead (who created an alternative version of frequentism) to C. D. Broad, Keynes to R. B. Braithwaite, Dorothy Wrinch, Ramsey, and beyond. All were as critical of Venn as they were of each other, but each of them was confronted with a similar problem situation, the contours of which had been sketched by Venn. The Logic of Chance therefore deserves a prominent place in the local background of early analytic philosophy, both at Cambridge and in Britain at large.

7

Religious Thinker

(1867–73)

Around the late 1860s, Venn’s acquired academic identity—as a moral sciences teacher, writer of a logical textbook, and member of intellectual circles—began to overlap with his inherited identity as a prominent Evangelical. His active role in the Moral Sciences Tripos and his membership of the Grote Club and Eranus Society brought him in contact with some of the most advanced religious and philosophical opinion in the university. Much to his father’s despair, Venn found himself surrounded by “honest doubters” whose religiosity was of a decidedly nondogmatic stripe. At that same time, Venn emerged onto the public Evangelical platform in and around Cambridge. He not only continued to take occasional clerical duties and served as the junior and senior dean of Caius College but also participated in Evangelical society and contributed to the pages of the Evangelical Christian Observer. Venn’s cultivation, by his own father, as an Evangelical thinker went hand in hand with his own development as a religious writer critical of Evangelicalism. Both The Logic of Chance (1866) and his Hulsean Lectures, delivered in 1869, contained contributions to a religious logic that put into academic form his wide reading and his private examination of the nature and truth of religious belief. Venn’s religious logic is perhaps especially remarkable for having anticipated key insights from the tradition of pragmatism, which has long been thought to have originated in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the work of C. S. Peirce and William James, and to have arrived at Cambridge, England, only in the 1920s. The case of Venn offers a more complex and richer perspective on the twin histories of pragmatism and early analytic philosophy, on both sides of the Atlantic

Public Evangelical

Even with “all that was distinctive of Evangelicalism” slowly falling off him, Venn’s parting of ways with family tradition did not happen overnight.1 After having left Mortlake in July 1862, Venn had escaped from the influence of an Evangelical vicar, but when he returned to residence at Cambridge some two months later, there was still the radiating presence of his father, living nearby in East Sheen. Of Henry Venn’s three children, his oldest son had moved furthest away from his sphere of influence. Venn wrote weekly letters and paid regular visits, but his sister, Henrietta, kept their father’s house, and his brother, Henry, worked for many years at the CMS, where he served as their father’s private secretary (see figures 7.1 and 7.2). Many of Henry Venn’s letters to Cambridge written in the 1860s ran over with emotional expressions of hopes for his eldest son’s future clerical life and silent fears that it might never come to pass. Writing from Lausanne on 31 July 1863, Henry Venn pondered how

the scenery & the endearments of Lucy & Harry cannot check the currents of my thoughts which I have towards you & your employments; & often makes me conscious of a void. At such times I solace myself with the pleasant recollections of 20 months we spent together at Mortlake, & of your Sunday afternoon sermons, & I pray God soon to open the way to your having a sole change of souls, to whom you may again witness for Christ & for the power of his grace. . . . I shall offer many prayers . . . not only for your growth in grace, but that you may have much wisdom & boldness in making manifest the truth of the Gospel.2

Between 1862 and 1864 Venn had spent a total of several months helping Clayton (Holy Trinity), Frederic Wigram (St. Paul’s), and other Evangelicals with their clerical duties in and around Cambridge.3 Around December 1864, disillusioned with his first academic post of college lecturer, Venn undertook what would be his final “spell of curateship,” even though there was “little of the professional life involved.”4 For a period of six months Venn worked for John Lamb, the Caian vicar of St. Edward’s, Cambridge, “a small parish with almost no poor.”5 At Caius, Venn also served his rotation as junior and senior dean, between 1864 and 1866.

7.1 Venn’s father, Henry Venn of CMS, date unknown. From crayon sketch by Mr. Richmond. Reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

7.2 Venn’s brother, Henry, and sister, Henrietta, aged around twenty-eight and thirty-four, ca. 1865–66. By F. Joubert. Reproduced by permission of the Cadbury Research Library Special Collections, University of Birmingham, and the Church Mission Society.

Owing to his father’s involvement, Venn had been drawn into the extensive and well-oiled “Evangelical machine.”6 He traveled to London to support his father at meetings of the CMS, joined the supporters of the CMS in Cambridge at their termly dinner at the Eagle, and attended meetings of the Christian Vernacular Society and other occasional events organized by local societies at which clergymen delivered missionary sermons or former missionaries recounted their experiences.7 Venn reported back on these meetings to his father, reviewing the performance and success of the speakers in front of a university audience. For some time, Venn also assumed nominal secretaryships of one or two such societies, including the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews, founded in 1809 by leading Evangelicals such as William Wilberforce and Charles Simeon.8 Being a Venn brought with it much Evangelical obligation. Henry Venn’s letters to his son from the 1860s are full of references to people—often the sons of his own Evangelical contacts, such as the grandson of John Thornton of Clapham—with whom Venn was expected to make acquaintance, mostly because Henry Venn wished to pass down his “blessed friendships.”9 Venn dutifully called on many of these men at his father’s request.10

At some point in the mid-1860s, Henry Venn came to accept that whereas his younger son, Henry, was best suited to clerical work, his older and more intellectual son might perhaps serve the church best in the “nursery of the Christian Ministry,” the university.11 Henry Venn was fully aware of the difference between the clerical circles of East Sheen and the academic circles of Cambridge, but he hoped that they, father and son, could gather their forces: “We two live in totally different atmospheres. I am surrounded by men who all speak one language & fire up the shadow of any compromise of the Truth. You live surrounded by men speaking different languages & leaving the Truth to take care of itself. So that in the good providence of God we may mutually assist each other . . . by guarding the one against narrowness, the other against a breadth beyond the limits of faith.”12 The very fact of his son working in an environment where he crossed paths with such “radical” figures as Maurice, Seeley, and Sidgwick instilled in Henry Venn a mixture of fear and confidence. One of his “poor but constant prayers” for his son was that meetings with Seeley, who was made Regius Professor of Modern History, Cambridge, in 1869, “may be to your and his spiritual benefit, and in no degree to your hindrance.”13 Henry Venn perhaps recognized the difference between clerical and academic circles and the intellectual needs of well-educated religious men. But he did not suppose that his son’s life and work at Cambridge would give rise to any serious religious doubts.14 Both from his public activities and from his “guardedly orthodox” private response to some of the nationwide controversies of the time—Maurice’s resignation of his living, John Colenso’s work on the Old Testament, the discovery of material “older than creation” in France, Stanley’s dismissal of the historical accuracy of the Bible, and so on—he seemed warranted to assume Evangelical commitment on the part of his son.15 Henry Venn could not have fathomed the growing religious difficulties that Venn himself would later identify as happening in the 1860s and 1870s. During those years, Venn, responding to the demands posed by honest doubt and a duty to truth in the examination of the relation between science and religion, would slowly but steadily create his own identity as a scholarly Broad Churchman. Given the strength of Henry Venn’s influence over his son, however, this process of guarded soul-searching would not be brought to a conclusion during his lifetime.

Almost until his death in 1873, Henry Venn put much energy in cultivating his eldest son as an Evangelical thinker—which for him was not at all an oxymoronic figure.16 Around the time of Venn’s return to Cambridge, father and son changed the tone and content of their weekly letters and visits, from the personal and the everyday to loftier matters. They became interlocutors. They shared their thoughts on investments in various stocks and shares and discussed all kinds of church business—for example, colonial bishoprics, the legal autonomy of the church, and High and Low party conflicts.17 Given the great heat of most of these religious issues, and the felt need to establish the Evangelical position on a firm academic footing, Henry Venn particularly appreciated the less emotional, more intellectual arguments that the pen of his son produced.18 He encouraged him to discuss his views with Thomas Birks—the leader of scholarly Evangelicalism who embodied what he had in mind for his son—and solicited articles and reviews of books from him for use in the Christian Observer, the organ of Anglican Evangelicalism.19

The Christian Observer

Henry Venn was editor of the Christian Observer between 1868 and 1872; Venn, for his part, became a fairly regular contributor, and unofficial editorial assistant, in these years.20 Already in 1865, Henry Venn had asked his son for a “very decisive reply” to a “dangerous” article written by the Broad Church dean of Westminster, Arthur Stanley, published in Fraser’s Magazine and entitled “Theology of the Nineteenth Century.”21 Stanley had presented Essays and Reviews as part of a larger tendency of critical and historical Bible study coming from Germany that was said to penetrate below words and dogma to the very essence of Christian doctrine and which could, therefore, be called a new Reformation. Following his father’s suggestion, Venn responded to Stanley by arguing, firstly, that Evangelicalism had provided the characteristic theology of the nineteenth century—as evidenced, for example, by the most widely read religious writings of the time—and, secondly, that nothing positive was achieved by the questions and doubts of the Essayists.22 By that time, Venn privately already endorsed a similar scientific approach to religion, having arrived at a position on verbal inspiration similar to that of Stanley. He nonetheless found himself able to satisfy his father’s needs in producing Evangelical polemic, albeit anonymously.

Some two years later, in 1868, Henry Venn suggested to his son that he should publish a new edition of Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), a staple of Christian orthodoxy in which Butler argued for the truth of core doctrines of natural and revealed theology. The book had always been one of Venn’s personal favorites; he carried a pocket version of it with him on his travels, and he referred to it in his Logic of Chance. Although the new edition did not materialize, in 1871 Venn’s “Bishop Butler Reviewed in the Light of Modern Thought” was published in the Christian Observer.23 The article lamented the fact that recent evidence presented before the Parliamentary Committee on University Tests showed that, after Paley, the works of Butler were going out of vogue as well. Venn sought to illustrate the relevance of Butler’s defense of the compatibility of Christian religion with modern science by drawing attention to his use of scientific method and, especially, his grasp of the limits of scientific reasoning. Venn first emphasized the inductive nature of Butler’s Analogy of Religion, which argued for the existence of design and miracles on the basis of probable evidence, rather than traditional deductive arguments. Next, Venn outlined Butler’s argument that, since a firm grasp of the “complete design of the Creator” lay beyond the capacity of human understanding, it is impossible to question isolated elements of this plan by the standard of present knowledge.24 Together, these aspects were said to show that Butler “had got hold, more than perhaps any other man of his day, of [some] of the most important and fertile ideas of the present time.”25 Given that he had criticized Butler’s views on the probability of miracles in The Logic of Chance, Venn seemed willing to strategically switch between his academic and religious persona in the interest of argument and audience.26

The boundary between these two personae was not entirely strict. This became clear, for example, in the letters that Henry Venn wrote just before the appearance of the article on Butler. Here, he had urged his son to “think of some title which will be ‘catchy’” and to make more of “Butler’s deficiencies,” which he probably found in natural theology’s inability to either posit a cause or suggest a remedy for human sin.27 Henry Venn’s advice was the same in the case of Venn’s review of the Catholic convert John Henry Newman’s apologia for faith, Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870). Venn—for much the same reason as Ludwig Wittgenstein about a century later—was greatly impressed by the book, in which Newman defended the rationality of faith without reducing faith to common logical standards of rationality. What struck Venn most was the idea that religion had its own logic, and that it was possible to examine the plethora of “informal inferences” with which real persons come to their religious convictions. Venn’s main point in his review was, indeed, that the method of Grammar of Assent, though proposed by a Romanist, was not connected with Romanism, and could be used to support any religious position. He took the liberty to approach the book from a logical rather than from an Evangelical party perspective.28 What followed was a “rather dry, and not very easily intelligible” outline of the two parts of Newman’s analysis of religious assent: that of believing what one does not understand (“apprehension”) and believing what cannot be absolutely proven (“illative sense”).29 The acts of assent were of two kinds—real and notional—of which the former was said by Newman to correspond to the religious assent, or personal faith, of the Roman Catholic and the latter to the merely theological assent, or intellectual faith, of the Protestant. The key feature of religious assent is that it is the unconditional result of a process of personal reasoning, where one recognizes the convergences of “probabilities too fine to avail separately, too subtle and circuitous to be converted into syllogisms” that justify an assent of certitude.30 Venn concluded his review by writing that the bulk of Grammar of Assent consisted in a defense of the “true and valuable” position that in religious and moral matters, formal arguments were too restrictive and too narrow to be of use to daily life.31 Perhaps even more than Butler, Newman struck a chord in Venn. Like Newman himself, Venn hoped to find a balance between his academically trained mind and his personal faith.

Unsurprisingly, the review was not what was expected for the readers of the Christian Observer. Before its publication, Henry Venn asked his son to consider “the objections of the Stephens that [Newman’s book] ignores Truth & justifies any man in believing what he likes.”32 When the review was eventually published, Henry Venn himself added a supplement, introduced with an editorial note: “Those who wish to know how a master of rhetoric and logic deals with the phenomena of human beliefs as a matter of science, will find in the foregoing review a candid analysis of the book. Some will, however, wish to know how far the Grammar of Assent throws light upon many anxious questions which perplex a sincere Christian.”33 Henry Venn was proud of his son’s intellectual achievements but was concerned that “the readers of the C.O. are not so intelligent or as yet ‘educated up to’ your style.”34 Much like his cousin Fitzjames Stephen—writing for the Christian Observer in the 1850s under the editorship of J. W. Cunningham, his father-in-law—Venn relied on editorial interventions from his father to give his articles the required proper tone.35 Behind such stylistic and rhetorical concerns stood a growing difference in the way that father and son approached religion. Venn adopted a position of open enquiry. His Cambridge-trained mind, combined with his identification as a Broad Churchman, made him value honest doubt over uninformed belief. Henry Venn, for his part, was conscious of the dangers of free intellectual exploration. He felt that open enquiry—of the truth of religious views, of the bearing of modern science on religious evidence, and so on—needed to be limited to a certain extent for the sake of the duty of religious conformity.36 Importantly, however, far from being nonreligious, Venn wished to work through the logic of his own religious belief, which he knew was only partly intellectual and mostly emotional in nature.

Religious Logic

During the 1860s and early 1870s, Venn not only penned anonymous articles for the Christian Observer but also developed himself into a religious thinker. The Logic of Chance included several discussions on natural and revealed religion, where it was shown that probability could not be used for design arguments or applied to cases of testimony concerning miracles. Venn’s aim was to downplay any grand claims made on behalf of the theory; just as no amount of mathematics could replace the process of induction, the calculation of probabilities of events was hopelessly inadequate to offering knowledge of the nature of reality or the divine. Perhaps more remarkable was the new view of religious and scientific belief, first put forward in The Logic of Chance, which Venn developed in his Hulsean Lectures, delivered in 1869 and published a year later. These lectures were soon forgotten, but they are of interest for having established an early form of “pragmatism” that predated the work of the American pragmatists Peirce and William James, both in its core and in some of its implications, especially concerning the rationality of religious faith and the view of truth in terms of habits of action.

Probability and Religion

Venn’s discussion of religious themes in The Logic of Chance was almost entirely negative and, as he himself admitted, not everywhere well thought out. However, it does provide a glimpse of his thinking at the time, when he started to consider the relation between logic and religion and to use his work on probability theory to understand religious certainty and belief, both in everyday life and in theology.

Venn was anxious to show that probability theory did not undermine a belief in God. He saw two ways that it could—mistakenly, he believed—be taken as a support for atheism. When the cause of an event is attributed to chance, then chance could be understood to be a distinct agency (“Chance”). Or, if chance is taken to mean “without a cause,” then events would not be under God’s control. According to Venn, probability is concerned only with statistical frequencies and has no implications about the causes of individual events. Since the whole theory is postulated on ignorance of single events, it is not needed—as Hume, Laplace, and De Morgan thought—to point out that it does not lead to indeterminism; nor can it be used—as Buckle and Quetelet believed—to prove determinism. “It is the fact of [our] ignorance that makes us resort to the theory of Probability, the causes of it are quite irrelevant.”37 The existence of chance in the world, whatever it may be, is irrelevant to the logic of chance. “All that we have implied,” Venn explained in a later article, “is our ignorance about many of the detailed events, which is an extremely different thing from declaring that these events lack the regularity upon which any knowledge could be built.”38 But could it not be said that this regularity proves that the events have regular antecedents and consequents? Without using the word, Venn pointed out that the analysis of statistical regularities concerns correlation rather than causation, degrees of partial causation between events instead of causal chains linking them. It was a topic he would return to some twenty years later, in the third edition of The Logic of Chance and in his collaboration with Francis Galton for the Cambridge Anthropometric Laboratory.

Venn’s other theme was that of the probabilistic approach to testimony and evidence.39 This theme was central to Butler’s project of natural theology and his argument for revealed religion as well as to Hume’s famous criticism of miracle stories. The discussion centered around the idea that the more improbable an event, the more the acceptance that it actually happened depends on the credibility of witnesses. Given its prominence in The Logic of Chance—and the fact that the chapter was profoundly rewritten for the 1876 and 1888 editions—Venn may be said to have followed Butler and Hume in their belief that the credibility of Christian miracle stories is important because if the reported miracles were genuine they would prove Christian doctrines. Since he adopts a rather Humean approach, another explanation might be that Venn justifiably felt that Hume’s section “Of Miracles” in An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, which had been aimed to dispel “superstitious delusion,” was not widely known or discussed in Britain.40 At any rate, Venn’s chapters “The Application of Probability to Testimony” and “On the Credibility of Extraordinary Stories” are an example of the fact that Venn devoted a lot of time and attention to subjects that he himself claimed to lay far beyond the scope of probability.

Venn argued that probability theory cannot be applied to cases of testimony at all, especially not to those typical in apologetics: “Here is a statement made by a witness who lies once in ten times, what am I to conclude about its truth?” Venn dismisses such calculations altogether, not merely because he doubts the very “possibility of thus assigning a man his place upon a graduated scale of mendacity” but also because “the circumstances under which the statement is made . . . are of overwhelming importance” and “would make any sensible man utterly discard the assigned average.”41 The problem is that of finding an appropriately tight reference class. But since there are so many variables involved in any particular instance of testimony—Venn’s list includes time and place of utterance, occupation of the witness, tone of voice, class prejudices, local sympathies, and so on—it is simply impossible to do so.

Venn believed that there is a particularly great difficulty in applying probability to what he calls extraordinary stories, having in mind, especially, the argument for miracles from testimony. First of all, probability theory in all strictness does not apply to cases where the (im)probability of a statement depends on the reliability of the witness, which, in Venn’s opinion, cannot even be expressed numerically. Moreover, any application of its rules to such cases is either vacuous or arbitrary; when the statement comes from a witness of a given reliability, the only option is to accept it as having that given degree of probability in its favor; when the witness’s reliability is allowed to vary according to the nature of the statement—assuming, for example, that people are more likely to tell the truth about rare events—this depends entirely on the listener. In the second and third editions of The Logic of Chance, Venn refined his analysis, making use of Marquis de Condorcet’s 1783 attempt to build reliability into a mathematical treatment of testimony. The outcome was much the same. “We must,” Venn concluded, “reject all attempts to estimate the credibility of any particular witness, or to refer him to any assigned class in respect of his trustworthiness, and consequently abandon as unsuitable [the 1876 edition had “abandon as insoluble”] any of the numerous problems which start from such data.”42 Venn’s criticism marked the end of the “golden age” of the probabilistic analysis of testimony, which was revived around the end of the twentieth century.

Venn’s discussion of miracles showed that he was writing for an audience different from that of Butler. Butler’s had been an audience that claimed to believe in God, thinking that a rational belief in God might undermine the credibility of miracles. Venn’s audience, instead, was divided into two schools or “prepossessions”: there were those who perhaps believed in God but who approached miracles in their scientific form, as a suspension of a law of causation, and those who believed in God and understood miracles in terms of divine intervention. Venn’s point was that the probability that someone would ascribe to a miracle story depended heavily on whether that person lived under the former or latter “prepossession.” According to Venn, their disagreement is not about facts or evidence; instead, it relates to the ground from which these are perceived:

Any one who believes that the moral and physical world form one great scheme need find no insuperable difficulty in accepting a Revelation . . . nor consequently in accepting the miracles . . . which are connected with the Revelation. But if, on the other hand, we start with the Inductive principle of uniform causation, and then attempt . . . to establish, first, such and such a miracle, and thence a Revelation; it is hard to see how . . . any accumulation of testimony could do more than baffle and perplex the judgment [and] leave us finally in doubt.43

Venn took his reasoning one step further in another example, writing that “it might even be more easy for a person thoroughly imbued with the spirit of Inductive science, though an atheist, to believe in a miracle which formed a part of vast dispensation, as the Christian miracles do, than for such a person, as a theist, to accept an isolated miracle.”44 How to make sense of the fact that those living religiously and those living “scientifically” seemed to be living in different worlds? And how, if at all, to reconcile these two forms of life within one and the same person?

Religious Belief

Henry Venn was immensely proud of his son when in 1869 he was given the “particular & very special opportunity” to give the Hulsean Lectures before the university.45 The election was a mark of distinction, and Venn did not hesitate to accept the invitation to preach from the pulpit of Great St. Mary’s Church. He titled the lectures “On Some of the Characteristics of Belief, Scientific and Religious.” Henry Venn found the topic to be “the most appropriate you could have chosen,” but, upon reading the first sermon, he cautioned his son to guard himself against “being misunderstood.”46 Venn’s Hulsean Lectures showed the duality of Venn’s position. On the one hand, he satisfied his father, who expected him to show “the unreasonableness of unbelief—upon the very principles of the Rationalists.”47 On the other hand, rather than providing evidence for Christian faith, the sermons defended the rationality of living religiously even when belief in scriptural truth was lacking. The essence of belief, Venn argued, lies in the habits to which it gives rise. “A faith which does not produce action,” as his father summarized his position, “is a non-entity.”48

Henry Venn read the sermons and was prepared to meet his son halfway, allowing him to pursue the kind of scholarship that set the authority of man’s reason over God’s word but protecting him from criticism and controversy. He offered suggestions to “save you from being misunderstood, and from an outcry being raised, which might hinder the usefulness of your volume and check its circulation.”49 Once again, Henry Venn’s appreciation of the distinction between writing for a general Evangelical audience and the educated audience in the University Church was evident in his proposal for the introduction to the Hulsean Lectures. “Were I addressing an ordinary congregation,” he wrote in a letter in September 1869,

I might warn you against exercising yourselves in matters too high for you and refer you at once to the written word of God for the authoritative resolution of your doubts. But my present position among you, my knowledge of the currents of thoughts—my sympathy for enquiring minds whose way to the Holy Scripture needs to be cleared from preliminary obstacles will induce me on this occasion to meet you on your own ground and to help you solve your difficulties of method of strict reasoning and scientific research &c.50

Henry Venn knew that for the average Cambridge man religion needed to be credible on both intellectual and moral grounds. He himself was not doctrinaire or rigid in his religious thinking and could rejoice in the religiosity of people of other creeds. A prominent Evangelical statesman, he published a little-understood biography of the Roman Catholic missionary St. Francis Xavier, whom he praised for his strong devotion and zeal. But Henry Venn was as cautious about turning the intellect into the standard and measure of religious doctrine as he was about the dangers of following human reason wherever it may lead. Venn, however, was taking the view that in a university, there was an obligation to pursue knowledge for its own sake: “A University would indeed be wallowing in the mire when it taught, or sanctioned the teaching that truth was not to be pursued anywhere, almost anyhow, and at any risk.”51 Venn’s Hulsean Lectures, delivered in 1869 and published in 1870 along with an introduction and appendix, were illustrated, explained, and fleshed out the implications of the difference between scientific and religious belief. Venn’s choice of subject matter had both an internal and an external motivation. It allowed him to return to ideas about belief, evidence, and truth put forward in The Logic of Chance and to examine their relevance for understanding the relation between science and religion. But this topic itself was clearly influenced by the circumstances of the time, particularly the party differences within the Anglican Church, as well as their negative impact on the broader “crisis of faith,” when compared to the relative unanimity of opinion among the members of the scientific community. One of the central messages of Venn’s four lectures was that the significance of these differences could be diminished through the creation of a religious logic, understood as “a Christian appendix to our familiar works on Psychology and Logic,” which provided a logical explanation for the role of emotions in religious opinion.52 At the heart of this logic stood the remarkably pragmatist idea that, when defining belief—whether scientific or religious—as “a state of the mind in which we are prepared to act upon the truth of any proposition in question,” the belief element of faith did “not essentially differ from any other act of belief.”53 It made his Hulsean Lectureship a rather daring enterprise: rather than taking up a metaphysical, theological, or dogmatic approach toward revealed religion or Holy Scripture—which was the assigned task—Venn approached religion as a logical subject. The very fact of doing so could easily raise the suspicion that in delivering his sermons the Hulsean Lecturer was not practicing and showing evidence for religion but searching for a justification of faith.

Venn’s lectures were based in part on arguments that he had already put forward in The Logic of Chance. The central idea of his new logic of belief—that of defining belief in terms of a readiness to act, as Alexander Bain did around that same time54—appeared in almost the same phrasing in that book, anticipating the key pragmatist doctrine of habit by several years. It had been introduced there to justify degrees of belief about single contingent events lacking a statistical frequency. “A man is obliged to be acting,” Venn wrote, “and therefore exercising his belief about one thing or another almost the whole of every day of his life. Any one person will have to decide in his time about a multitude of events, each one of which will never recur again.”55 The test and justification of beliefs about such events were to be found in practice, in the kind of conduct they give rise to. Venn’s analysis of belief in The Logic of Chance had been concentrated largely on their intellectual side, on finding out which beliefs and which actions were beneficial to someone’s life, of knowing how much someone was willing to risk by acting on this or that belief. His examples were that of gains and losses in annuities, insurances, and lotteries, and his central message that life was about balancing them as much as was rationally possible. At the same time, Venn did recognize that all belief and hence all action is partly intellectual and partly emotional, with each and every daily judgment being mediated through “hopes and fears.”56

The first lecture provided an explanation of the logical roots of religious differences of opinion—showing “what there is in the constitution of the evidence which makes it possible for differences to commence and persist.”57 It was in this way that Venn sought to explain both individual fluctuations in belief and the nationwide lack of religious unanimity. Venn’s starting point was to view belief, scientific or religious, as willingness to “act upon the truth” of certain evidence, whether it was an article of a creed or a scientific fact.58 Unlike science, someone’s religious belief is always the result of numerous sources and kinds of evidence as well as a specific apprehension of the evidence, influenced by upbringing, experience, reading, and, especially, emotions. But like science, a particular religious position does not rest on a completely solid foundation but consists of parts that are linked together into a more or less coherent whole, where a change in one part affects all the others. Here, Venn emphasized what he called the “objective aspects” of emotions, which showed that emotions contributed to religious belief not only as feelings or passions but as some of the “facts which have to be taken into account,” as one of the “premises, and a most important one, from which our conclusions about life must be drawn.”59 Thus, for example, “Every believer must connect [his religious sentiments] with his convictions, and thus give them an objective reference; he will say that they refer to certain facts of history and Revelation, and that if these facts were disproved the whole fabric of conviction falls with them, and of the sentiments will soon follow.”60 Venn was adamant that religion is not seen as “a system of doctrines which must be true or false” but as a “theory of life” on which the believer acts, one that not only accounts for but also is confirmed by the believer’s experiences of the world.61 He was well aware that this pragmatism with a Coleridgean twist was a far cry from accepting Christianity as the one true religion. It opened up the door for alternatives—for instance for psychologists who, by reducing religious sentiments to bodily or mental facts, prepared the way for their denial, or for positivists, whose acknowledgment that religious sentiments could not be as easily dismissed as religious facts had encouraged them to invent a new “Religion of Humanity.”62

Unsurprisingly, Venn’s second lecture searched for a criterion of truth. How is it possible to know which beliefs are right and which wrong if people entertain different judgements on religious evidence? Venn did not offer a conclusive answer, nor did he take a dogmatic approach, saying what should be believed. Instead, he argued that those beliefs are true that after honest examination have shown to be useful and beneficial for someone’s life. That is to say, firstly, that beliefs should be tested out by “living by the doctrine in question”; secondly, that beliefs should be constantly subjected to the “shaking down” process of daily life; and, thirdly, that what will emerge is a coherent and harmonious whole of beliefs whose adoption is rational because they have proven beneficial. Not only are there resonances here with the Evangelical theme of personal spiritual honesty, with Broad Church values of testing out each religious assumption, and with Tennyson’s defense of “honest doubt” in his In Memoriam—the poetic Bible of many of Venn’s peers at Cambridge. But Venn’s emphasis on the importance of every individual’s active search for religious truth, and his description of the process by which someone might become convinced of a new idea, also anticipated his own struggles as described in his autobiographical Annals:

Many a scheme, which at first struck us as very ingenious, will in this way lose all hold upon the mind without its being strictly disproved. And conversely, other schemes, as to the value of which we were once very doubtful, grow in our estimation as we continue to find them harmonising with our other convictions and adapting themselves to the varying necessities of our daily life. . . . There will be a time of disturbance and of ferment until the new arrangement has been effected [and] there may well be a time during which he has grasped the new ideas, and is fully convinced of their truth and importance, but is struggling to fit them into their place and to get out of old grooves of thought and feeling and practice.63

Venn’s position was less radical than William James’s in his famous 1896 lecture “The Will to Believe,” with which the Hulsean Lectures show striking similarities. Unlike James, Venn, for instance, accepted that there was evidence for religion, emphasizing time and again that God’s testimony was to be accepted without hesitation. James would return to the question of evidence in 1902, examining mystical experience and religious passion. Venn would have appreciated James’s description of religion as a partly emotional and partly intellectual “attitude,” but his own focus in 1869 was too much on traditional Christian faith to accept anything mystical as religious evidence. At the same time, notwithstanding these differences, the implications of their general positions did strongly resemble one another. First of all, the emphasis was on religious belief as a personal matter. Venn wrote, for instance, that his theory was, strictly taken, concerned only with the internal logic of an individual’s opinions. Secondly, religious beliefs were said to be true if they made a difference in practice that was advantageous or beneficial to the individual’s life. Venn frankly admitted that the truth of religion cannot be proven and that secularism cannot be strictly disproved. All that could be done, in fact, was to insist that it was disadvantageous to shape one’s conduct, to live one’s life, in total disregard of religion. All this greatly upset Venn’s father and uncle, who both felt that the second sermon was not “fully worked out”; what was lacking were “examples of Truths which have received the stamp of the test you describe” and an acknowledgment of “the Bible as the Source of Truth.”64

Venn, for his part, was more interested in the question of what is meant by someone’s believing this or that truth. His answer is reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s pragmatic analysis of certainty: “Of course it is not meant that he says he believes it. . . . The best . . . test is found by studying his actions. When a man is acting deliberately, and knows what he is doing, the question, Does he believe this proposition? is best answered by others, if they substitute for it the question, Is he acting upon the assumption of its truth? If he is, I should say he does believe; if not, no; quite irrespective of anything he may say or suppose upon the subject.”65 For Venn, as for later pragmatists, whether Peirce, James, or Ramsey, all belief is indissolubly bound to action. His central idea was, indeed, that truth has “no meaning or explanation except in reference to our conduct.”66 Venn had hit on this idea in 1866, and he used it in 1869 to turn his view on religious belief into an admittedly rough-edged, but nonetheless remarkably prescient form of pragmatism.

The third and fourth lectures considered the relation between a number of Christian doctrines and emotions. Venn, as said, accepted that there was evidence for religion, and he insisted that the Athanasian Creed, for example, would be accepted in any temper. But it was becoming increasingly clear that from the position of his own religious logic Venn was unable to dismiss, say, the secular or Catholic option of living. Hence, it was perhaps not more than obvious for him to take up another challenge: what to do if in doubt about which doctrines to live by? One option was to think difficulties over for oneself, to the point where it would be better to disregard them, and the other was to accept doctrines on ecclesiastical authority. According to Venn, this last option is supported by those, like Blaise Pascal, whose philosophical skepticism leads to religious dogmatism. Venn reconstructed the Pascalian argument as follows: even though human reason is at a nonplus as to why and what we should believe, prudence can suggest that it is safest for us to believe. Since the church provides means for helping us to believe, any prudent individual should hasten to accept its doctrines. “It says,” writes Venn, “‘This is what comes of thinking; you will find yourself involved in a maze whence escape is quite hopeless; then do not think, but assent.’”67 Again, much like James, Venn rejects the so-called doxastic voluntarism implicit in Pascal’s famous wager: the idea that one has voluntary control over one’s beliefs and that feigning religious belief to gain eternal reward is a possible and even beneficial strategy. Venn emphasized that belief is neither fully an act of the will nor absolutely independent of the will. Instead, religious belief always revolves around the “prodigious practical importance of the life you lead upon the convictions you entertain.”68 Mere nominal faith is no faith at all.

Venn’s vocal rejection of Pascal’s wager stands in stark contrast to its much more positive treatment in the appendix to the Hulsean Lectures. Interestingly, as James would do in 1896, Venn formulated his own alternative wager.69 There is an important sense in which this should come as no surprise. First of all, like Pascal, Venn believed that making a choice about living religiously or not was impossible to avoid and that the choice to do so may best be understood as “balancing a present loss, certain and small, against a future gain, probable and vast.”70 Secondly, unlike many of Pascal’s critics, including James, Venn did not perceive an antithesis between self-interest and truth in religious matters: he was not at all convinced that Pascal’s wager implied inauthentic religious belief. James, for one, would later write that, “after such a mechanical calculation,” religious belief would “lack the inner soul of faith’s reality.”71 “The fact is,” Venn argued in 1869, thirty years before James, “that all successful action, and therefore that dictated by self-interest, rests upon truth; in other words, if we wish to succeed we must have as many true beliefs and as few false ones as possible.”72 Given his own theory of truth, in the case of the contingent events that pervade everyday life, this means that it is rational for someone to act as if the event in question will happen. For example:

When . . . we are confronted by rival alternatives each of which rests upon a probability only, it is sheer madness to adopt the one which seems the most probable simply because it is so, and in defiance of the loss and gain which we thereby incur. . . . I do not mean that we must believe events to be more probably true than they really are; far from it; but we must constantly act upon the hypothesis that an event may really happen when we well know that such a contingency is very unlikely.73

Thirdly, Venn denied that there was a difference between making such decisions from a position of ignorance on religious or from a position of ignorance on worldly matters. Instead, seeing all belief as a decision problem or betting situation, in both cases—whether for the prudent gambler or the honest believer—practical rationality should be our guide:

There is a great danger, I think, in admitting any sharp distinction between the principles upon which we act in regard to our temporal or spiritual interest. . . . If a man is to be applauded for undergoing the annual sacrifice of paying a premium to guard against the bare chance of having his house burn over his head, why is he not to submit to the various sacrifices required by religion, if these sacrifices will in any way remove the chance of a far worse catastrophe?74

According to Venn, anyone acting on the chance of salvation was merely “‘insuring his life’ in a somewhat higher sense.”75

Venn’s Hulsean Lectures gave a pragmatic argument for religious belief, intended to motivate a this-worldly action on the basis of the benefits associated with that action. His wager stood somewhere between Pascal and James. Like Pascal’s wager, it has the structure of a gamble made in the midst of uncertainty about the future, and it is centered around the chance of salvation, that is, around the Christian option for belief. Like James’s argument, its aim was to defend the rationality of living religiously rather than to argue for the need for doctrinaire theological assent. Taken together, Venn agreed with the starting point of Pascal’s wager, which he found “natural and appropriate,” but rejected the outcome motivated by it.76 What troubled Venn was the idea that the wager should lead to dogmatic faith. At the core of his own wager stood the “hearty” and “efficient” action of the “honest-minded man,” one who, when insuring his house or insuring his chance of going to heaven, knows that he must make a decision but that he is acting on a mere contingency.77

Venn ended his Hulsean Lectures with a reflection on how people could fall from and be brought to faith—that is, on ways of changing one’s habits, modes of life, character, disposition, sympathies, and prejudices. It was possible for believers to gradually lose their faith, for example, by plunging into frivolity or by total absorption in business or scientific study. It was also possible for unbelievers to come unto faith, but this process was more complex since a whole scheme, prepossession, or irreligious way of living, had to be replaced by a new one almost at once. Venn’s audience, consisting of all sorts of Cambridge men, including undergraduates, was reminded of the benefits of their university for living religiously. Drawing from his own experience of college life, Venn felt that college life made possible the kind of practical life needed to act in accordance with the truth of the Christian faith: it offered protection from the “dark side of human life,” ample time for quiet reflection, and a safe haven where the pursuit of one’s own happiness coincided with that of others.

A Broad Churchman

During the period between the late 1860s and early 1870s, as the contradiction between his public action and private thinking intensified, a tension emerged between Venn’s inherited and acquired identities. Venn established an intellectual and social life for himself at Cambridge through which he attained a new level of independence, especially from his father, making it possible for him to gradually move to a position of Broad Churchmanship. He began to see himself, and was perceived by others, as one of the new generation of Cambridge men who was active in teaching, examining, and publishing, with the ambition to pursue an academic career. This generation benefited from the university reforms of the royal commission that led to a greater emphasis on teaching, relaxation of the rules of celibacy, and, eventually, abolition of religious tests, which would allow men like Venn to practice their own form of Christianity. Already by 1864, Venn, when asked, would have described himself as “a very moderate Broad churchman” who, among other things, found the essence of Christianity not in dutiful assent but in experience, and who sided with religion, in its clash with science, only “within its own province.”78

At the same time, Venn demonstrated a continued willingness to take services in Evangelical churches and to write for a decidedly Evangelical periodical. This was likely due to paternal influence. In the letters between father and son, there is no reference to the growth of the religious difficulties that Venn himself would identify as happening during this period. When Henry Venn referred to some of the public “blows to faith” of the time, his son’s response was guardedly orthodox, for example dismissing F. D. Maurice’s reasons for resigning his living as “fanciful.”79 And when commissioning articles for the Christian Observer, Henry Venn assumed Evangelical churchmanship on his son’s part. For Henry Venn, study and academia were means to an end; both had to be applied to a higher purpose. Thus, when in 1866 his son stood as a candidate for the Knightbridge Chair of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge, he could justify it in terms of God’s providence, offering his son an opportunity to exercise Christian influence by virtue of academic standing. He would express much the same sentiments when, a few years later, upon Maurice’s death in 1872, his son again put himself forward for that chair. But it is likely that Henry Venn was not unpleasantly surprised with the appointment of Birks, whom he knew personally as a sound Christian since the early 1860s. Over the years, a professional academic identity defined by an increasingly secularized approach to knowledge emerged at Cambridge, one for which a professorial chair was valued for its importance for teaching and learning. However, the residual strength of the religious tradition at Cambridge as well as the differences within the camp of reformers would show, for example, in 1879 when the vice-chancellor, the Evangelical Edward Henry Perowne, offered Venn the position of deputy to the Knightbridge Professor.80 When Perowne made the offer, Venn told him

that I could not accept it, as I considered that no one but Sidgwick ought to be appointed. He invited me to call upon him, & we had a long talk about the matter. His defence was that as he was choosing a deputy for Mr. Birks he could not fitly select any one whose opinions were so entirely opposed to his. Of course this did not alter my opinion, but I felt that there was something in what he said. He then urged me to accept the place; saying that as he should certainly not appoint Sidgwick I should not in the least be standing in his way. I could not see my way to this, & definitely declined.81

After J. Neville Keynes, who was then still teaching logic and political economy, declined the post for much the same reason, it was offered to Sidgwick’s and Venn’s former pupil William Cunningham.82 Sidgwick inferred from the event that “when the vacancy in the chair occurs I shall very probably be passed over similarly.”83 Several years later, however, it would be Sidgwick who was appointed as Knightbridge Professor, with Venn’s support. With Sidgwick’s appointment to one of the oldest professorships in Cambridge, a radical reformer, pioneer of the moral sciences, nonclerical fellow, and “agnostic saint” was be elevated to a position of prominence from which he would oversee (the controversies over) the further reform of the Moral Sciences Tripos in the 1880s and 1890s.

Although Henry Venn, and others, like Perowne, with him, assumed Evangelical churchmanship, he nonetheless had some understanding of his son’s struggles. He was aware of the texts with which, and the people with whom, his son was familiar; he wanted to protect his son’s academic approach to religion from being misunderstood and giving rise to controversy; and he appreciated the different values and standards of the academic circles in which his son moved. Already in 1861, he had urged his son to speak freely with his brother, referring back to a period when their uncle John’s doubts about remaining in the church had been resolved through united prayers. Several years later, in 1869, Henry Venn hoped not only that the Hulsean Lectures would help his son to once again “see light” but also that his suggestions would help him to guard “against a breadth beyond the limits of Truth.”84 Rather than a defense of Evangelicalism, however, the Hulsean Lectures were a logical manifesto in disguise of a Broad Church, Liberal Anglican position, one that distinguished religious belief from Christian faith and did not even explicitly acknowledge the “sin of unbelief.”85

A Broad Church influence was also evident in Venn’s position on subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles. During the 1860s, conscientious objection to subscription was a practical and politically laden problem of the first importance to Maurice, Sidgwick, and others outside Venn’s direct circle, such as Arthur Stanley. Mill and earlier utilitarians before him had expressed withering contempt for Oxford and Cambridge, where so many capable persons, whether agnostics, Jews, Catholics, or Methodists, were officially beyond the pale of higher education until the religious tests would be abolished in 1871. Many commentators in the early 1860s were taking the flexible line that subscription did not involve belief in all the details but only a general conformity. This sentiment led to the appointment in 1864 of a Royal Commission on Clerical Subscription, to which Henry Venn was invited. He sent papers from the commission to his son, asking for his thoughts on the matter. Venn’s response was prompt, stating that he would “certainly be pleased to see the ‘assent & consent to all & everything’ got rid of, or at least smoothed down.”86 Rather than discussing issues of conscience, as Sidgwick did and the young Maurice had done, Venn argued that there were two practical questions that had to be taken into account: “(1) What alteration the majority want: somewhat as in taking off a tax you do it at a point which will give most relief consistently with the revenue being retained, and (2) to be corrected and assisted by seeing how other communions get on with modified subscription, or without them.”87 Venn supported the opinions of Stanley, the prominent Broad Churchman and dean of Westminster who had achieved notoriety in orthodox circles with his defense, attacked by Venn in his 1865 article for the Christian Observer, of the theological significance of Essays and Reviews. Stanley also defended the Essayists by objecting to the idea that the clergy should have less liberty of thought than the laity, arguing that receiving only “men of dull minds or dull consciences” into the ministry was damaging to the Church.88 Henry Venn, illustrating the strength of his own churchmanship in his response to his son’s points, was among those who upheld a high standard of subscription as a tool of a strong national and unified Church. He found it not more than reasonable to expect that a minister should “at least be a man who honestly fulfils the character of a Church of England clergyman, up to the mark which the constitution of the Church has fixed. . . . If it further excludes really valuable men—let it be abated—but still keep up to the mark of bona fide Church ministers.”89

Despite Henry Venn’s scruples, the Clerical Subscription Act of 1865 provided a relaxed form of subscription, asking for general rather than “unfeigned” assent.90 Venn would have been aware of the gap between this and the view of his friend Sidgwick and his cousin Leslie Stephen, who believed that reserve was unacceptable and that every clergyman should state his position plainly: imprecise assent was just a dishonest way for Broad Churchmen to circumvent agnosticism.91 Venn, however, apparently found no contradiction between a Broad Church position and a liberal view of subscription. Like Stanley, he was willing to defend a view unpopular among the clergy, but he did not want to place himself outside the church. “Personally I feel no doubt that I have done right,” Sidgwick reflected on the resignation of his fellowship in 1869, “for one must at last act on one’s own view.”92 Around 1870, Venn was unable to follow suit. It was a time of great disturbance. But the “old grooves” of thought and feeling and practice were still there, preventing him from accepting the demands and implications of intellectual honesty.

Between the late 1850s and early 1860s, Venn had been “like a body launched with great force in a direction against the stream, whose original impulse is powerful enough to keep it in the primitive direction for a considerable time.”93 Over the course of the 1860s and 1870s, Venn felt like someone “impelled by a powerful force” (in his case his own father’s influence) “against the natural current of his temperament and studies.”94 For over a decade he would remain in a highly confusing condition of “unstable equilibrium, conscientiously holding contradictory doctrines”: a very moderate Broad Churchman living as an Evangelical.95 Venn would explain his slow departure from Evangelicalism to a Broad Church position in terms of a shift in the balance of authority in his life. Venn’s Evangelicalism had never been founded on any “intellectual convictions” but had been accepted “as a whole” and was held together by the feeling of the “enormous superiority of those who have gone before me” and the emotion of “reverence” for his “saintly father.”96 Importantly, his philosophizing and soul-searching eroded Evangelicalism, but they did not provide a ready-made alternative scheme or “theory of life” that could easily take its place. At least until the early 1880s, Venn’s religious position was “difficult to understand & describe,” even for himself.97 Venn contrasted the “unstable equilibrium” in which he found himself with the sudden religious transition of Newman, described in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua:

I can scarcely realize the mental state of a man like J. H. Newman. Every opinion he held seems to have been perfectly clearly realized: there was no hesitation: every doctrine when abandoned was dropped finally. It [seems] to me that the history of his conversion might be summed up in a series of aphorisms or axioms:—“There must be a true Church somewhere. I held it to be the Anglican. But the Jerusalem bishop . . . disproved this. It can’t be the Greek Church. So it must necessarily be the Roman. Q.E.D.” So he opened his mouth wide, & swallowed the whole.98

Venn, for his part, suppressed his public Broad Church identity until his father’s death in January 1873, and, even then, it took him another ten years before he resigned orders under the Clerical Disabilities Act of 1870.

8

Logic Papers

(1874–80)

During the period between the 1870s and late 1880s Venn devoted himself entirely to the study and teaching of logic. It was in these years that he became a professional logician, widening his intellectual circle to include colleagues at other universities, both at home and abroad, with similar specialized and professionalized scholarly interests. Both Symbolic Logic (1881) and The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic (1889), the two textbooks written after The Logic of Chance, were the outcome of his ordinary lectures in Cambridge and the publication, between 1874 and 1880, of some dozen papers in academic journals such as Mind—the first specialized philosophical journal in England, founded in 1876 by Alexander Bain, who appointed George Croom Robertson, his former student, as its first editor.

With these publications, Venn carved out a distinctive place for himself on the landscape of British logic, where, after its sudden revival by Richard Whately in the 1820s, new ground had been broken in both the deductive (“Aristotelian”) tradition and the inductive (“Baconian”) tradition. On the one hand, there was formal logic—the so-called Aristotelian-Victorian syllogistic of Hamilton and others—which De Morgan and Boole chose as the basis for their algebraization of deductive reasoning, known as algebra of logic or equational class logic. This development, as well as that of De Morgan’s logic of relatives, would eventually pave the way for the first-order propositional and predicate-quantificational logic of Peirce, Gottlob Frege, and, especially, Whitehead and Russell at Cambridge. On the other hand, there was the inductive logic of John Herschel, Mill, and Whewell, who each tried to capture, in large part through historical reconstruction, the reasoning process by which scientists arrive at knowledge and make discoveries. These two logical traditions were complexly related: they covered entirely different ground—each denying that the other’s subject matter deserved the name of “logic” at all—but were also in conflict. Ever since Bacon, inductive logicians felt that logic should deal with the validity and conditions of knowing actual things rather than solely with the formal rigor of thoughts. They traditionally left syllogistic logic for what it was. Mill was among the first to try to show that deduction was grounded on induction, but he conceded deduction entirely to Aristotle’s syllogism. The deductive logicians, for their part, tried to formalize the laws of operation of the human mind by which reasoning is performed. But ever since Aristotle, and especially since Whately, in addition to moving deduction beyond the syllogism, they also tried to turn inductive inference into syllogistic form or to argue that induction is inverse deduction (and could thus be probabilized). What was at stake, in other words, was whether induction or deduction held the key to human knowledge: if it was the former, the latter would be a mere formal game; if the latter, it might be possible to mechanize scientific reasoning. This issue touched on a number of broader themes in Victorian scientific reform. For example, whereas some later members of the deductive school sought to “democratize” Britain’s scientific institutions and practices, many of those of the inductive camp tended to stress the importance of scientific heroes, whose rare genius could not be reduced to following mechanical rules.

Like his major rival William Stanley Jevons, De Morgan’s former pupil, Venn would be primarily engaged in weaving together these two strands of British logic. Both men, each in his own way, sought to synthesize the work of Mill and that of Boole, as well as to revive and reconcile some of the disputes between Mill and Whewell on scientific methodology. For this reason, their own contributions have generally been regarded as a mere commentary. Their work in logic has consequently been largely forgotten or at least received far less attention than that published by others between the 1830s and 1850s and, subsequently, from the turn of the twentieth century onward. It is no surprise, therefore, that the historiography of British philosophy and logic has tended to remain almost silent about the 1870s through the 1890s. This was the period when Venn, Jevons, and others like Herbert Spencer, Lewis Carroll, Hugh MacColl, Carveth Read, and Alexander Macfarlane together formed an active group of British logicians, itself part of a larger international community to which also belonged Christoph Sigwart and Ernst Schröder in Germany and Peirce and George Bruce Halsted in America. They discussed each other’s views as well as those of the previous generation—Hamilton, Boole, and Mill but also, for example, William Hamilton, Alexander Bain, Thomas Spencer Baynes, and Henry L. Mansel—who had worked in the wake of Whately’s revival.

The study of Venn’s work on logic provides an opportunity to fill a long-standing gap in our understanding of the history of nineteenth-century British thought. This chapter makes a start by taking up Venn’s transitional papers from the 1870s, where he worked his way into British logic, trying to make sense of its problem situation and presenting himself as a critical follower of Mill with a fascination for Boole. The next chapters will build on this account to explore Venn’s Symbolic Logic and The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic in more depth.

British Logic in the Nineteenth Century

After a century and a half of “perversion and neglect,” the serious study of what was variously called scholastic, common, syllogistic, or traditional logic was revived in Britain through the publication of Whately’s Elements of Logic (1826), which Venn taught for many years to Cambridge students in one of his regular courses.1 The Elements of Logic provided a detailed restatement and defense of Aristotle’s system of deductive logic, also known as the syllogistic.2 Whately closely followed Henry Aldrich’s rigorous formulation of all 256 Aristotelian syllogisms in the Logicae Artis Compendium (1691) but radically changed how they, and hence logic in general, were to be conceived. Rather than as an instrument for the discovery of truth or as the art of rightly employing the rational faculties, Whately presented logic as an abstract science concerned solely with the formal analysis of the validity of arguments involved in deductive reasoning:

Since, then, an argument is an expression in which from something laid down and granted as true (i.e., the premises) something else (i.e., the conclusion) beyond this must be admitted to be true, as following necessarily (or resulting) from the other; and since Logic is wholly concerned in the use of language, it follows that a Syllogism (which is an argument stated in a regular logical form) must be “an argument so expressed, that the conclusiveness of it is manifest from the mere force of expression,” i.e., without considering the meaning of the terms.3

When it comes to its reception and its influence, Whately’s notion of logic as an abstract formal science occupied a remarkable position in the history of British logic. Almost all nineteenth-century British logicians, from the early commentators to the later innovators, acknowledged Whately as the restorer of the study of logic in Britain, but none of them, however, was a follower of his work.

Whately’s Commentators

The reception of Elements of Logic roughly fell into two groups. All early commentators followed Whately in his view that deductive logic was syllogistic logic, but each of them found his conception of logic too narrow—Bentham and Hamilton, on the one hand, because they wanted to revisit the syllogistic; Mill, on the other hand, because he hoped to develop a logic of induction.

William Hamilton challenged Whately’s account of the logical form of propositions in an 1833 review, published in the Edinburgh Review.4 His main point was that Whately, in his attempt to show that all reasoning could be assimilated to the syllogism, had failed to distinguish the two different meanings of induction: the material inference of a universal judgment from particular facts, and the formal inference of a universal judgment from particular judgments. According to Hamilton, it was this omission that led Whately to suppose induction to be a form of reasoning where the major premise, which was generally suppressed, could be expressed as: “what belongs to the individual or individuals we have examined, belongs to the whole class under which they come.”5 Whately had argued that if it was found, for instance, that each of several examined tyrannies lasted a short time, in coming to the conclusion that “all tyrannies are likely to be of short duration,” use was made of the suppressed major premise that “what belongs to the tyrannies in question is likely to be of short duration.” Hamilton dismissed the suppressed major premise as an extralogical postulate that concerned material or empirical rather than formal reasoning and proceeded to sketch what he claimed to be a truly logical theory of induction. The central claim underlying Hamilton’s theory was twofold. Firstly, that the human mind reasons either deductively (from a whole to its parts) or inductively (from parts to a whole), and, secondly, that deductive inference presupposes inductive inference insofar as all “knowledge commences with the apprehension of singulars.”6 As part of the attempt to make logic justify both deductive and inductive inference, Hamilton showed that the two reasoning processes were actually the reverses of each other, with the conclusion of the inductive argument (left) being the first premise of the deductive argument (right):

x, y, z are A

B is A

x, y, z are (whole) B

x, y, z are (under) B

Therefore, B is A

Therefore, x, y, z are A

Hamilton was aware that the inductive argument, a third-figure syllogism with a universal conclusion, seemed invalid. But, as he pointed out, whereas in the first premise the predicate (“A”) contained the subject (“x, y, z”), in the second, the subject (“x, y, z”) constituted the predicate (“B”)—which were both valid patterns. Here, the predicate of the major premise, as Hamilton wrote, was the subject of the minor premise:

A contains x, y, z

A contains B

x, y, z constitute B

B contains x, y, z

Therefore, A contains B

Therefore, A contains x, y, z

Importantly, insofar as the second premise of the inductive argument could be read as stating that “x, y, and z are all of B,” such that the terms of the proposition stood in a so-called extensional relation, the predicate of one of the premises of a syllogism was quantified. Aristotelian logic now gave four basic categorical propositions (“All X is Y” (A), “No X is Y” (E), “Some X is Y” (I), and “Some X is not Y” (O): on the basis of the quantification of the subject and the predicate, Hamilton enlarged the Aristotelian syllogistic to eight (“All A is all B,” “All A is some B,” “Some A is all B,” Some A is some B,” “Any A is some B,” “Any A is not any B,” “Any A is not some B,” “Some A is not any B,” and “Some A is not some B”) and the number of valid syllogisms from twenty-four to thirty-six. Hamilton, thereby, placed “the keystone in the Aristotelic arch,” albeit in scattered articles and posthumously published lectures and notes.7 Many of his most important results were presented in the Lectures on Logic (1866), which Venn would teach to moral sciences candidates in the late 1860s. Hamilton would later claim priority for the “quantification of the predicate”—the theory, sometimes called the greatest discovery in logic since Aristotle, which said that categorical propositions implicitly involved quantification over the predicate term—in a notorious dispute (mostly from Hamilton’s own pen) with De Morgan in the late 1840s.8 The two respected Oxford philosophers William Thomson and Mansel took Hamilton’s side. Baynes, Spencer, and Jevons announced in 1873 in the Contemporary Review that the new system of logic had already been spelled out by George Bentham, the nephew of Jeremy Bentham, in Outline of a New System of Logic: With a Critical Examination of Dr. Whately’s Elements of Logic (1827).9 A self-trained botanist, Bentham had applied his interest in method, especially the method of division as exemplified in taxonomy, to rework Whately’s classification of the logical forms of propositions on the basis of the following insight: “Every simple proposition may be reduced to the expression between two ideas . . . represented by the two terms (subject and predicate); the relation itself by the copula. The species of relation here referred to are those of identity and diversity and of logical subalternation.”10 For Bentham, identity was expressed by the copula “is” and diversity by the copula “is not.” However, for the copula to express an identity between classes, the subject and predicate had to be of the same quantifiable form—hence the quantification of both. What resulted from the use of equations and symbolic quantifiers were eight rather than four forms of judgment and a move away from relations of “resemblance” and “essence” to a logic of classes that would eventually be taken up by the pioneers of algebraic logic. Unfortunately for Bentham, because the press that published Outline of a New System of Logic went bankrupt after only sixty copies had been sold, the book went unnoticed until many years later he was mentioned by others as having anticipated Hamilton in quantifying the predicate.

Mill’s fifteen-thousand-word review of Whately’s Elements of Logic for the Westminster Review in 1828—his first publication on logic—agreed with Whately on two principal grounds. Mill not only agreed with his defense of deductive logic, as the study of the validity of reasoning, against the ridicule that Bacon and Locke had “heaped upon the syllogistic theory.”11 Like Whately, Mill also believed that the induction beloved of empiricists was not a form of inference but merely of collection of data. “The syllogistic logic,” Mill wrote, “affords the only rules which can contribute to the correctness of our reasoning”: “It is, to use Dr. Whately’s words, not an art of reasoning, but the art of reasoning: “all correct reasoning is syllogistic: and to reason by induction is a recommendation which implies as thorough a misconception of the meaning of the two words, as if the advice were, to observe by syllogism.”12 Despite his sympathies for Whately’s outlook, Mill was deeply puzzled by (Whately’s treatment of) the “great paradox of the discovery of new truths by [deductive] reasoning”: “that mankind may correctly apprehend and fully assent to a general proposition, yet remain for ages ignorant of myriads of truths which are embodied in it, and which, in fact, are but so many particular cases of that which, as a general truth, they have long known.”13 The puzzle of the epistemic significance of logic made Mill see, “through the glass of his syllogistic prejudice,” a general problem about deductive inference that sparked a train of thought that eventually led him to doubt whether the syllogism was really a form of inference at all.14 Though clearly inspired by the Elements of Logic, Mill’s System of Logic would reverse completely Whately’s views on the relation between deduction and induction. It argued that all inference is inductive, understood as reasoning from particular facts to particular facts.

Whately’s Innovators

During the 1840s and 1850s, there emerged two lines of criticism of Whately’s Elements of Logic. On the one hand, from the algebraic logicians (De Morgan, Boole, et al.) and, on the other hand, from the inductive logicians (Mill, Whewell, et al.). The members of the first group followed Hamilton, who, despite his notorious hostility to mathematics, had placed the equation at the center of logic: they took the major step of changing the basic units of reasoning by which a logical inference is made deductively (in)valid. Aristotelian subject-predicate sentences were broken down into the more elementary components of subject class term and predicate class term, and the figures and moods of syllogisms were replaced by the algebraic combinations of such terms. It was now possible for logic to analyze all the ways in which properties can be predicated of objects and propositions can be combined to form more complex statements. On this basis, all known ways of syllogistic categorical reasoning were turned into the solution of algebraic equations, and an entire new realm of (“non-Aristotelian”) propositions and inferences was made accessible. What Venn would call “symbolic logic” was part of, yet did not put over the top, the mathematical revolution in logic, climaxed by Frege, Whitehead, and Russell. Among other things, Boole’s part-whole analysis of extensional classes was not general enough, that is, was still too faithful to Aristotelian term logic, to capture, for instance, the inferential structure of mathematical reasoning.15

The second group, that of the inductive logicians, had very different concerns. What they shared was a commitment to the Baconian search for the scientific method and a polemic against Whately and other “Oriel Noetics” at Oxford. Both Whewell and Mill, who were engaged in a debate among themselves about who was the true inductivist and legitimate heir of Bacon, believed that the inductive and deductive ways of thinking entailed opposing attitudes toward politics, morality, and religion.16 Despite their many differences of opinion, Whewell and Mill opposed, in their own way, the kind of abstract-deductive political economy that flowed from Whately’s Elements of Logic. According to Whewell, Herschel, and their fellow Baconian Richard Jones, Whately—much like their friend Charles Babbage in his unofficial Bridgewater Treatise—had completely neglected the religious and moral virtues of the laborious process of ascending from observations to conclusions. The inductive logicians, for their part, completely neglected deductive logic. It was up to Venn’s generation of followers of Mill to see how the Baconian tradition was to take account of recent innovations in the “Aristotelian” realm of deductive logic.

Boole’s Mathematical Analysis of Logic had appeared on the same day in 1847 as De Morgan’s Formal Logic. Both books drew on the British tradition that freed algebra from the grip of arithmetic, and both sought to extend, rather than supplant, Aristotle’s syllogistic by means of the systematic application of algebra.17 Some of De Morgan’s results on algebraic logic in Formal Logic, and several related papers, prefigured more effective treatment at the hands of Boole, who is generally considered the founder of the algebraic tradition in logic.18 Other innovations coming from De Morgan (such as the generalized copula, nonsyllogistic forms of inference, and especially the logic of relations) helped pave the way for predicate-quantificational logic through their fuller treatment by Peirce, Schröder, and others. De Morgan’s work was part of the algebraic tradition, but his system did not capture the attention of next generations. Venn, for example, would never discuss it, focusing entirely on Boole. When Venn did discuss De Morgan, it would be in one breath with other logicians, like Frege and MacColl, whose innovations he dismissed as illegitimate modifications of Boole’s system. Boole’s Mathematical Analysis of Logic received far greater attention than De Morgan’s, but it was in his Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854) that Boole articulated and developed his “mature and systematically developed” logical calculus.19 Boole held the normative purpose of logic to be the analysis of all components of valid reasoning, both “necessary and probable,” as De Morgan would say. Although his starting point and the topics he dealt with were provided by the Aristotelian syllogistic, Boole strongly felt that, in order to achieve this purpose, the tradition needed to be greatly enriched.20 This is exactly what the Laws of Thought hoped to achieve: “The design of the following treatise is to investigate the fundamental laws of those operations of the mind by which reasoning is performed; to give expression to them in the symbolical language of Calculus, and upon this foundation to establish the science of Logic and construct its method.”21 There were two parts to Boole’s logic: first, a formal system or calculus, and, second, a method to analyze propositions and arguments with that calculus. The first part set up a formal language, consisting of class terms (x, y, z . . .), the special class “0” (the empty class), the special class “1” (the “universe of discourse”), a relation symbol “=” (identity between classes), and three operation symbols: addition (the union of classes), multiplication (the intersection of classes), and subtraction (taking complements of classes). Boole was what Venn would call a “conceptualist” not only because all these symbols represented classes of objects “whether existing or not” but also because they were akin to mental acts.22 For example, the operation symbols stood for “operations of the mind by which the conceptions of things are combined or resolved so as to form new conceptions involving the same elements.”23 To complete his formal system, Boole gave six laws of thought and two rules of inference. Some five of these laws corresponded to familiar arithmetical properties: for example, in the first law (x + y = x + y) is recognized commutativity of addition and in the fifth law (x − y = −y + x) subtraction. Boole’s third law (x² = x), which says that “if the two symbols [x and y] have exactly the same signification, their combination expresses no more than either of the symbols taken alone would do [and] in such case [we have] xx = x,” traditionally received more attention in the literature and split the Booleans into two camps.24 Unlike the other laws, the index law is an ordinary algebraic equation, but it makes sense only when not thought of as a principle of algebra. Let x represent a class, and let “∙” be interpreted as intersection of classes. Then the logical product x ∙ x = x² represents the operation of taking the intersection of the class x with x itself; and this is x again. Boole compared it to saying “good, good men,” a pleonasm equivalent to “good men.” Taken together, Boole’s position was that algebra can be used to express the laws of logic and that these laws, not those of mathematics, embody the laws of correct reasoning. This is the core of the algebraic tradition. It is opposed to the tradition of mathematical logic, especially in the “logicist” version anticipated by Jevons and represented by Frege and Russell, mainly because it applies rather than reduces mathematics to logic.

The second part of Boole’s logical system was his general method, which comprised several steps: first, to convert premises into algebraic equations; second, to apply one or more algebraic transformations to the premise equations, so as to produce conclusion equations; three, to convert conclusion equations into propositions (conclusions). By the time that Boole came to write his Laws of Thought, he expanded his earlier translations of all four of the traditional A-E-I-O categorical propositions to include Hamilton and De Morgan’s additional four, which were not recognized in Aristotelian syllogistic logic. “All Y’s are X’s,” for example, was expressed as y = vx, where the controversial elective symbol “v” stood for partial intersection of classes. This translation into algebraic form was possible owing to an examination of the internal structure of the proposition. For “All Y’s are X’s” to hold it must be the case that the X’s subsume all of the Y’s: if “X” and “Y” denote two classes (or subclasses of “1”), then the Y class must itself be a subclass of X. Or, in Boole’s own words:

“All men are mortal”. In this case it is clear that our meaning is, “All men are some mortal beings”, and we must seek the expression of the predicate “some mortal beings”. Represent then by v, a class indefinite in every respect but this, viz., that some of its members are mortal beings, and let x stand for “mortal beings”, then will vx represent “some mortal beings”. Hence, if y represents men, the equation sought will be y = vx.25

Boole demonstrated his method for a number of traditionally valid syllogistic inferences. In order to do so, and to have a calculus for reasoning on classes (and propositions), he needed additional techniques. One of these was that of the “elimination” of unwanted logical elements from an equation or set of equations, which Boole explained as follows: “As the conclusion must express a relation among the whole or among a part of the elements involved in the premises, it is requisite that we should possess the means of eliminating those elements which we desire not to appear in the conclusion, and of determining the whole amount of relation implied by the premises among the elements which we wish to retain.”26 Within traditional syllogistic logic, the elements that appear in both premises but not in the conclusion are called “middle terms,” and elimination consists in deducing from two propositions, containing a middle term, a conclusion connecting the two remaining terms. For Boole, the problem was far more general: he wished to extend reasoning of the syllogistic type to reasoning that involves more than two premises or three terms. Boole gave many ingenious examples illustrating the method of elimination. He then went on to apply his algebraic logic to several complex problems, demonstrating that it went beyond the capabilities of traditional Aristotelian logic and was also more powerful and general. Boole’s work from the 1840s and 1850s opened a new era in the history of logic. But it was not until the 1870s and 1880s that his immediate followers, like Venn, Jevons, and MacColl, would realize its full significance.

The inductive tradition of Baconian thinkers like Mill, Whewell, and Herschel noted none of these developments in which formal, deductive logic became algebraic logic, which took deductive reasoning far beyond the syllogistic. Their mistrust of deduction traced back to Bacon himself, who famously sought to replace the entire tradition of Aristotelian logic. As a result, syllogistic logic lay dormant for several centuries until it was revived by Whately, in whom Herschel, Whewell, and Mill found a common opponent. All recognized the formal soundness of Hamilton’s quantification of the predicate, but they did not see the implications that De Morgan and Boole were to develop. They believed, in fact, that such innovations would be of little interest to the study of the inductive process by which scientists actually arrive at knowledge about the world. There were rules for this, but no laws. As the cases of Kepler and Newton showed, it was perfectly possible not to follow them. This at most raised the suspicion that one was not reasoning scientifically, not that one was not engaged in reasoning at all. Herschel, Whewell, and Mill agreed that scientific knowledge is obtained through induction and that logic should provide a sufficiently general explanation of how this is done; they disagreed about what induction is and, hence, about what an inductive logic should look like.

Venn arrived at inductive logic and scientific method through Mill and his debate with Whewell in the 1840s and 1850s. Mill’s System of Logic (1843) had provided an empiricist framework for a “logic of truth,” in opposition to a “logic of consistency,” comprising two parts: ratiocination, understood as an evaluation of reasoning, and induction, which formed the basis of all genuine reasoning and, hence, of knowledge.27 Book II put forward an idiosyncratic account of Aristotelian logic as it had come down to him through Whately. On the one hand, Mill endorsed Whately’s view that the syllogistic offered “a test to try the validity of any argument,” because it was “the form to which all correct reasoning may be ultimately reduced.”28 On the other hand, Mill dismissed out of hand Whately’s interwoven claims that the syllogism can lead to new (logical) knowledge and that it does not commit the petitio principii. Over the centuries, defenders and opponents of Aristotelian logic had discussed the charge that the syllogism was not a case of valid inference, since the conclusion (“Socrates is mortal”) was presupposed in the major premise (“All men are mortal”). Mill initially sided with Whately, but in A System of Logic he put forward the radical view that deduction is not properly inference at all, writing that “no reasoning from generals to particulars can, as such, prove anything: since from a general principle you cannot infer any particulars, but those which the principle itself assumes as foreknown.”29 Rather than concluded from the major premise “All men are mortal,” Mill held the conclusion “Socrates is mortal” to follow from the fact that “his fathers, and our fathers, and all other persons who were contemporary with them have died.”30 The major premise is established by means of a process of inductive reasoning from observed particulars to particulars, of which it is a mere aide-mémoire. Mill placed induction at the center of logic, and experience and observation—leading to the discovery of the laws of causation—at the center of induction.

A central task for Mill’s System of Logic was to provide an account of the ground of inductive inference. Mill found the “uniformity principle”—“that the course of nature is uniform; that the universe is governed by general laws”—to be “our warrant for all inferences from experience” and “the fundamental principle of induction.”31 Given that it was itself an instance of induction, the principle warranted inductive inference in much the same sense as the major premise of a syllogism established its conclusion: “not contributing at all to prove it, but being a necessary condition of being proved.”32 Rather than a justification of induction that went deeper than induction itself, the proper task of the logician is to supply a set of criteria that can be used to guide the process of induction and to distinguish good from bad inductive inferences. Mill found it in the laws of causation governing nature’s uniformities. Hence, the logician and the natural scientist had essentially the same goal: to discover the causal laws of nature. To this this end, Mill offered a series of Baconian methods of experimental inquiry, or canons of induction, which he took more or less from Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse and justified with reference to examples found in Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences.

The most significant debate to arise out of Mill’s System of Logic was that with Whewell concerning the nature and methods of induction.33 Whewell criticized Mill’s canons on two grounds. First, they were historically inaccurate: they did not capture the way in which science had progressed over time or the procedures that scientific heroes had followed in making their discoveries.34 Second, Mill’s canons—and his empiricist framework more generally—neglected the creative role of the human mind in the inductive process of arriving at knowledge. According to Whewell, a Kantian of sorts, all knowledge involves a combination of facts and ideas, which in the case of induction took the shape of the “colligation of facts,” or the bringing together of observed facts under some general concept or idea that unites them. Importantly, such concepts or ideas are not found in the phenomena themselves but are provided by the mind: “The particular facts are not merely brought together, but there is a new element added to the combination by the very act of thought by which they are combined. There is a Conception of the mind introduced in the general proposition which did not exist in any of the observed facts.”35 Whewell never abandoned his commitment to Baconian induction. Rather than a form of “hypothetico-deductivism,” which some commentators would later ascribe to him, Whewell arguably defended a reformed Baconianism, one that makes room for the “mental aspect” or “ideal elements” of knowledge. Mill, wary of any form of idealism—mainly because of its implicit political conservatism—argued that Whewell’s colligation did not belong to induction, properly understood: a conception is always of something, and it is this “something,” the world out there, on which induction depends.

Venn and British Logic

Whately, Hamilton, Boole, Mill, Whewell—these figures largely made up the world of British logic as Venn found it around 1870. After Whately’s revival of syllogistic logic in the 1820s and the rise of inductive logic in the 1830s and 1840s and algebraic logic in the 1850s, the 1870s were a time both of great activity and of pause and reflection. Logicians themselves were confused about the state of affairs in their own field of study. What was logic? What aims and challenges, if any, did logicians share? What separated inductive logic from natural science? What separated algebraic logic from mathematics? Were inductive and deductive logic, traditional or algebraic, both part of “logic,” or could each exist only at the expense of the other?

Venn pursued by and large four goals in the papers on logic that he published between 1874 and 1880. The first was to make sense of the contemporary situation in British logic and to create common ground among British logicians, who all seemed to have their own, sometimes rather idiosyncratic, understanding of what logic is. Following Mill, he proposed to draw up a sharp distinction between the conceptualist camp of Hamilton, De Morgan, and Boole and the materialist camp of Mill, Alexander Bain, and Herbert Spencer. (The insistence on the distinction is ironic in the sense that Venn himself would come to straddle the divide, searching for a materialist version of algebraic logic.) Venn’s second goal was to spell out the materialist view and to examine its vision of a purely objective treatment of logic, which seemed to reduce logic to science. The third goal was to sketch the contours of an alternative view, which combined elements of pragmatism, conventionalism, and a sprinkling of idealism, standing at the heart of The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic. The fourth and final goal was to come to terms with Boole’s algebra of logic and to put forward a “conservative” reading of its content, elaborated and defended in Symbolic Logic, which allowed him to remain true to his Millian outlook.

Review of Jevons’s Principles of Science (1874)

Some eight years after the appearance of The Logic of Chance, Venn published a review of Jevons’s Principles of Science in Academy in October 1874. The review announced the agenda for many of his contributions to logic in the years to come.36

Around that time, Jevons, a former pupil of De Morgan at University College, London, was working as Professor of Logic and Mental and Moral Philosophy and Cobden Professor of Political Economy at Owens College, Manchester. He had by then already published a short work on Boole’s Laws of Thought and three full-length books—Pure Logic (1864), Elementary Lessons on Logic (1867) and The Substitution of Similars (1869)—in which he presented himself as a critical follower of Boole, raising well-considered objections with the intention of furthering the “Boolean revolution” in logic.37 With his two-volume Principles of Science, Jevons reopened the earlier British debate on induction. George Croom Robertson, the first editor of Mind, praised Jevons for having far “outstripped predecessors as great as Herschel, Whewell and Mill” in his discussion of the methods, results, and limits of scientific method.38 Venn, who was among the first and few reviewers of the book, likewise referred to The Principles of Science as “the first elaborate treatise upon the logic of . . . inductive processes . . . published in England since the appearance of the well-known works of Mill and Whewell.”39

The general purpose of the book was “to go with Whewell” and to translate what Jevons took to be his theory of induction into a symbolic form.40 Jevons’s first step was to present induction as the inverse of deduction, aimed at the discovery, through hypothesis formation, of the general laws underlying a given collection of observed facts. The next step, with which Jevons paid homage to Babbage’s break with Baconian tradition, was to reduce all reasoning to the mechanical application of symbolized logical formulas, for which he used his own new principle of all reasoning—that of the substitution of similars, which says that what is true of one thing is true of the like or the same. Venn disagreed with almost every innovation that this move allowed Jevons to make. He thereby placed himself squarely in the Baconian tradition of Herschel, Whewell, and Mill. Venn dismissed Jevons’s claims against Mill that induction is not inference from particulars to particulars, that it is not more important than deduction, and that it does not bring certitude. And much like Herschel and Whewell before him, Venn also believed that the difficulty of inductive reasoning does not lie in the mechanical application of logical formulas—carried out by an abacus or reasoning machine—but in the precarious combination of facts and ideas. Because it must always first be decided what things are similar, the reduction of the copula “=” to identity is simply impossible in the case of induction: “When I have proved a property of a circle, I unhesitatingly apply the same property to any other circle, whether it be a plate or the visible disk of the sun. But when, having found that a number of ranunculaceous plants are unwholesome, I conclude that all the rest of the family will be so, there is nothing which can fairly be called [a similar] here, and in so far as there is any ‘substitution’ this is a secondary and dependent process.”41 On this basis, Venn also rejected Jevons’s definition of induction as inverse deduction and his view that no new knowledge could be, or had ever been, obtained by traditional (informal or “imperfect”) induction. Venn did acknowledge, for the first time, that Mill had given “too high a character of certainty” to induction, writing that Jevons had “rightly objected” to this.42 But he was unprepared to commit to Jevons’s alternative, which said that science does not induce from observations but formulates hypotheses and deduces evidence from the hypotheses, which renders them more or less probable. Venn was among those who ridiculed the project of probabilizing induction, initiated by De Morgan and Jevons, which would lie dormant until the 1920s and 1930s, when Keynes, Carnap, and Reichenbach picked it up again.43

Venn next discussed Jevons’s take on Boole. Jevons had been one of the very first to see the importance of Boole’s work, which he lauded as the greatest advance in the history of logic since Aristotle. But he also criticized Boole’s system and presented an alternative system that was supposed to overcome all its defects.44 Like Boole, Jevons believed that logic deals with the laws of thought, of which there were three: the law of identity, which states that a thing is identical with itself; the law of noncontradiction, which holds that a thing cannot both be and not be; and the law of duality, which asserts that a thing either possesses or does not possess a given attribute. The central principle of his analysis of human knowledge was that of the substitution of similars: all reasoning is nothing other than the replacement of a term in a logical equation by its equivalent. Hence, the Aristotelian terms “subject” and “predicate” become indistinguishable and thus obsolete. Within Jevons’s system, terms represent two things at once, both the extension and the intension, but the connotation or meaning is given pride of place. Another major difference with Boole is that Jevons wants to minimize the role of algebra in logic, since the believes that mathematics is ultimately based on logic instead of the other way around.

Venn agreed with Jevons that Boole had mistakenly suggested that mathematics is more fundamental than logic. At the same time, he disagreed with Jevons that the new algebraic logic is more fundamental than Aristotelian logic and that it should topple that tradition. Venn recognizes the power of Boole’s symbolic method of logical inference: given any number of propositions involving any number of terms, it shows how, by means of a purely symbolic treatment of the premises, to draw any conclusion logically contained in those premises. At the same, however, Venn believed that there is nothing that can be done by this method that cannot also be done by the traditional method. Since algebraic logic deals only with denotation or extension, its range is inevitably more limited than traditional logic, which also covers the connotation or intension of terms. Taken together, Aristotelian and Boolean logic each have their own pros and cons and their own range of application. Hence, both are a logic; any choice between them is ultimately a matter of convenience only.

One of the great merits of traditional logic, according to Venn, is that it keeps closer to the language and customs of everyday life, which makes it a valuable educational instrument. Boole’s symbolic methods were like algebraic versions of geometrical problems: “sparingly used . . . they have their place,” but “if the student comes to trust them, or employ them at all frequently they seem to deprive him of nearly all the good which logical training can afford.”45 This is a rather striking defense of traditional educational values of Cambridge, aimed at developing “the whole mental system of man” rather than training professional mathematicians.46 Indeed, Venn’s point, and here he followed Mill’s System of Logic, was that algebraic logic does not capture the “actual processes performed by the mind in ordinary reasoning,” which only traditional logic can help to improve.47

What Venn missed most in The Principles of Science was a discussion of a philosophical question that Jevons passed very lightly over, that of whether the foundations of logic are objective or subjective, of whether “the Material or the Conceptualist view is correct.”48 This would be the topic of Venn’s first full-length article in some fourteen years.

“Consistency and Real Inference” (1876)

Venn’s “Consistency and Real Inference” appeared in the inaugural issue of the new journal Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy. Its starting point was the current situation in British logic, seen from the perspective of the Cambridge student: “The principal difficulty in the way of a student of Logic at the present day (at any rate in England) consists not so much in the fact that the chief writers upon the subject contradict one another upon many points, for an opportunity of contradiction implies agreement up to a certain stage, as in the fact that over a large region they really hardly get fairly within reach of one another.”49 The main examples were that of Hamilton, who wrote that Mill’s System of Logic was “a somewhat arbitrary selection from Physical Science,” and Mill, who held that Hamilton’s work was “a somewhat arbitrary selection from Psychology.”50 Venn aimed to establish common ground for discussion by means of a comparison of the work of the prominent logicians of the day. He believed that all English logicians—Hegelians were excluded—would admit that a proposition is a statement in words of a judgment about things. This, of course, was already to assume quite a lot, for example that logical truth or falsehood is decided with reference to external reality, rather than in terms of formal validity. Each of these three sides of the proposition (words, judgments, things) could be taken to be fundamental; and since the proposition by analysis leads to terms, and by synthesis to arguments, “what holds of the proposition holds equally throughout the entire field of logic.”51 The first option, that logic deals only with words and language, defended by Whately, was dismissed out of hand. The other two options were the conceptualist view—which regarded a proposition as a judgment about mental concepts—and the material view—according to which observable things were the basis of logic.

Venn divided the conceptualists into two groups, which he nonetheless used interchangeably in his own oeuvre. First, there were the formal logicians, including Hamilton and his followers, William Thomson and Mansel at Oxford and Baynes, John Veitch, and William Spalding at St. Andrews. Second, there were the algebraic logicians De Morgan, Boole, and Jevons. Both groups were said to define logic as the “science of the laws of formal thinking” and concepts as the “mental counterparts of terms.”52 But whereas the former tended to do so in descriptive, psychological terms, the latter did so in the normative and abstract terms of mathematics. Consequently, the formal logicians could dismiss algebraic logic since, as they believed, there was nothing inherently mathematical about human thought. The algebraic logicians, for their part, emphasized that logic should deal with how humans ought to reason, not with how they actually reasoned. Venn’s opinionated treatment of conceptualism focused on four aspects: concepts, belief, classification, and induction. Each aspect was discussed to make essentially the same point: that every single conceptualist believed that logic has nothing to do with external phenomena and concerns itself only with the internal coherence of (systems of) propositions. This implied, among other things, that individual terms are abolished and that “perfect induction” is given pride of place over scientific induction.53 For example: “Mercury, Venus, the Earth, &c., all move round the sun from West to East / Mercury, Venus, the Earth, &c., are all the known Planets / Therefore, all the known planets move round the sun from West to East.”54 Like Mill, Venn held that perfect induction was improperly called induction, because rather than an inference from facts known to facts unknown, the conclusion merely summed up the known facts expressed in the premises.55

Venn’s treatment of the material view, with which he had already expressed his agreement in The Logic of Chance, focused entirely on what he regarded to be Mill’s “strongest claim to originality,” namely his theory of the syllogism.56 The discussion of this theory was limited to the petitio principii objection. One of Mill’s examples was that of “All men are fallible,” from which could be inferred “Some infallibles are not men.”57 When viewed as judgments, the latter seemed to be an inference from the former. It was only when the facts to which both judgments referred were taken into account that it was possible “to see at once that they are identical.”58 The petitio principii charge against the syllogism generalized this same point: when seen as a judgment, the conclusion is distinct from the premises, but when seen as an objective fact, it is merely a portion of the premises. According to Mill, Venn, and other British inductive logicians, it is always the major premise that contains the whole inference.

The main benefits of the conceptualist viewpoint were the “extreme simplicity,” “homogeneity,” and “completeness” of its logical systems, the superiority of the material view consisting in showing that these benefits came “at a heavy cost.”59 Venn, however, also admitted that Mill’s outlook faced serious and possibly insurmountable problems of its own. For example, logic cannot be strictly distinguished from the natural sciences, and it impossible to say how many times the same event must occur before an induction can be safely established. But the main problem was that of the ultimate foundation and ground of induction. Venn recognized that no logical answer could be given to the objection that Mill’s uniformity of nature justification of induction was circular. He nonetheless wanted to provide an answer, which he found in a partly evolutionary and partly pragmatic reading of Mill’s psychologism:

Let the logician . . . be permitted to transgress into psychological inquiries, and an answer seems ready to his hand. . . . He may fairly reply that we, or our ancestors, have acted upon that uniformity, as the brute creatures do, and that it was only at a later stage that consciousness awakened—that is, that what we call belief ripened out of mere association and habit. Take the case of the one of the more intelligent animals. They undoubtedly act upon the uniformity of nature; if they did not, they could not continue to subsist for a day any more than ourselves.60

Venn’s answer is exemplary of what would eventually develop into his alternative for Mill’s material view of logic. He accepted its difficulties, but instead of abandoning them as insoluble, he sought to circumvent them by enriching—or watering down—the view with evolutionary, pragmatic, idealist, and conventionalist considerations.

“Boole’s Logical System” (1876)

Boole had published his two great works around 1850, but it was only decades later, in the 1870s and 1880s, that the “Boolian reform of logical science” was beginning to manifest itself and bear the fruits of controversy.61 From the fact that most writers still believed that Boole regarded logic as a mere branch or application of mathematics—which might well have been the case—Venn concluded that the true nature of Boole’s system was “very far from being understood.”62 Venn put part of the blame on Boole himself. Boole had arrived at his system not by a logical path—generalizing elementary logical concepts and clothing them in symbols—but by a mathematical path—starting from pure formulas and manipulating them until they represented logical reasoning. The mathematical dress of his algebraic logic made it (too) hard to see that the system was “at bottom logical, not mathematical.”63

Jevons’s strategy had been to excise from Boole’s system everything that he found “obscure,” “mysterious,” or “dark and symbolic.”64 Venn took a different position. Like Jevons, he wished algebraic logic to be independent of mathematics. But rather than throwing away what seemed mathematical, he sought an explanation of every symbolic expression in purely logical terms. For example, unlike Boole, Venn aimed to provide a meaning for the fundamental process of the division of classes—called dichotomy—which he held to be nothing but an “algebraical generalisation, or rather a generalisation suggested by the processes of algebra” of the well-known law of excluded middle.65 Venn also criticized Boole for failing to distinguish the formal from the material side of division. Venn accepted that the process itself was purely formal, but since he did not allow for empty classes, that is, classes without members, there always had to be data to put limits to formality. “Here, as elsewhere,” Venn wrote, the data “are given by the premisses of our argument. These premisses put material conditions or limitations on the purely formal considerations . . . and lead us in fact to all the conclusions which the argument admits of.”66 Since the premises themselves are supplied by a prior process of induction, Venn’s position opened the way for a “material” reading of algebraic logic.

The bulk of Venn’s paper consisted in a discussion of the merits of Boole’s system, which he found primarily in the power and completeness of the “cumbrous” and “tedious” symbolic methods.67 At the same, Venn emphasized once again that the importance and authority of Aristotelian logic was not jeopardized. His new argument was that algebraic logic stands to traditional logic as traditional logic stands to everyday logic. Since the “operations of reason are at bottom the same however we may aid or express them by formulae and symbols,” everything that traditional or algebraic logic can do can at least in principle also be done by unassisted common sense.68

Venn concluded his article with three points about specific features of Boole’s system. His characteristic strategy was to defend Boole against innovators like Jevons. The first point concerned the best way of expressing the ordinary universal affirmative, “All Y’s are X’s.” Where Boole had used y = vx (“All mammals are some vertebrates”), Jevons proposed “X = XY” (“All mammals are mammalian vertebrates”). Venn preferred Boole’s expression, especially because its sense of indefiniteness accounted for the fact that in many cases “we have not a notion what Y is X, (this will constantly be the case when Y is an accidental attribute—a distinction not sufficiently recognised by Jevons).”69 The second point concerned the question whether disjunction had to be defined either in the mutually exclusive (“A or B but not both”) or in the inclusive (“A or B or, it may be, both”) sense. Despite his rejection of Boole’s claim that the expression x + y was meaningful only if x and y were mutually exclusive classes, Venn defended Boole against Jevons because Boole’s approach, unlike that of Jevons, improved on “popular vagueness.”70 The third and final point concerned Boole’s “fanciful” metaphysical speculations about the constitution of the human mind and, especially, his “strange” attempt to present the principle of contradiction (i.e., that “A is B” and “A is not-B” are mutually exclusive) as a consequence of “a law of thought, mathematical in its form,” namely the law of duality (“Boole’s law”), xx = x.71 As Venn wrote: “This law, regarded as one of thought, simply states that to think an attribute of a thing twice over is to do no more than to think it once;—to say of a thing that it is ‘black, black,’ is to say no more than that it is simply black. This is doubtless a very elementary truth, but to regard it as the source of the Law of Contradiction surely argues a strange inversion of order. However that law be regarded, nothing can well be considered more ultimate.”72 Venn’s first article on Boole already clearly showed the two-sidedness of his commitment to Boole’s work, characteristic of Symbolic Logic. Venn defended Boole against commentators and innovators by showing that Boole himself had not always been true to what Venn took to be Boole’s own intentions.

Review of Read’s On the Theory of Logic: An Essay (1878)

Venn’s third article in Mind—“The Use of Hypotheses” (1878)—returned to his ongoing project of working out the material view of logic. It provided some very tentative, and hardly memorable, thoughts on the debate about the nature and function of hypotheses within this system. Mill had argued that, though sometimes useful and unavoidable, hypotheses concerning unknown laws or unknown causes were always merely provisional. They became redundant as soon as all the facts and laws were available. Jevons, on the other hand, held that forming hypotheses is absolutely central to science. Venn advocated an intermediate position; he questioned Mill’s assumption of the perfect knowability of the world but refused to accept that hypotheses were somehow more fundamental than induction.

Venn’s fourth publication in Mind was a review of Carveth Read’s On the Theory of Logic: An Essay, a work so entirely devoted to the material view of logic as to impel Venn to make some sobering comments. Peirce had already ridiculed the book in the Nation by writing that “if it is not a striking success, it is because its author is not thoroughly well grounded in his subject”; in all his visits as a Hibbert Travelling Scholar to Wilhelm Wundt (in Leipzig) and Kuno Fischer (in Heidelberg), Read seemed “never to have come across any modern logic, except in English.”73 Much like Peirce, Venn criticized Read for denying what Venn called the “human or relative element in a system of Logic.”74 This was most apparent in Read’s straightforward identification of logical notions with physical facts: “[Read] always seems to regard the ‘Term’ as being a phenomenon itself, instead of being our representation . . . , whether in thought or in language, of the phenomena. . . . This is perhaps merely a matter of language, but it is surely an innovation, and one which leads to a . . . deficiency in our subject [nomenclature] (for what technical logical equivalent have we then left for the old ‘term,’ or ‘name’ . . . ?).”75 Whereas Peirce simply dismissed Read’s “matter-of-fact” view of logic as traditional and narrow-minded, Venn gave some examples in which a sense of “relativeness” forced itself on the logician, whether of the material camp or not. One example was that of the attributes that make up the connotation (or intension) of a general term. Because a connotation is always accepted on the basis of convention, point of view and available knowledge, it is impossible to say once and for all “what is the essence, meaning, or connotation of any general term.”76

Notwithstanding its criticism of Read’s radical material outlook, which Read would defend until well into the 1920s, Venn’s review of On the Theory of Logic, a “very thoughtful and suggestive essay,” was rather favorable.77 Like the reviewer of the book for the Westminster Review, Venn agreed wholeheartedly with Read’s analysis that inductive logic, “instead of being incorporated within the old, has merely been added to it.”78 This utter lack of synthesis was, indeed, exactly “the weak point in the logic of the present day.”79 Interestingly, Read had written his book largely in response, not to Mill’s own work, but to that of Mill’s critic Herbert Spencer in his Principles of Psychology (1855). This book would become a key source for Venn’s revision of his own material view of logic, called empirical logic, commenced in his next article.

“The Difficulties of Material Logic” (1879)

After a mention of his own remarks on “the possibility of a purely objective treatment of the science” in his review of Read’s On the Theory of Logic two months earlier, Venn opened his article in Mind on the difficulties of material logic with a bold statement:

That neither Logic nor any other science can possibly be regarded as being out of relation to the human faculties, we are . . . all agreed. Its necessary relativeness, in this sense, is universally admitted. Things are what they are to our faculties; their attributes are at bottom merely certain ways in which they affect us. Objectivity in this sense and under these restrictions is of course not confined to Logic, but is common to every physical science [yet] in Logic alone it deservedly obtains more explicit recognition.80

Venn referred to Spencer’s Principles of Psychology as the “best exposition” of this view and expressed his endorsement of the view that logic “formulates the most general laws of correlation among existence considered as objective.”81 This phrase was now placed at the heart of the material outlook, which meant that Venn was explicitly distancing himself from Mill:

My knowledge of the “thing” is very inaccurate and defective; this imperfect presentation of it is my conception or idea of it, and we term it subjective. But suppose this knowledge, always within the range of phenomena, developed and perfect to the utmost attainable degree [and] we should then have obtained what we may call objective knowledge. . . . In a word this knowledge thus rendered final and general is, for all . . . purposes, the same thing as the sum-total of “existences considered as objective” which [is] to be regarded as the subject-matter of Logic.82

Because the establishment of perfect, objective knowledge was “at present indefinitely remote,” Spencer’s definition of logic pointed to “an ideal towards which we are to aim” rather than “a goal which we can consider ourselves to have attained.”83 Consequently, there were two options for the material logician: either to ground logic on something that is unavailable or to accept that logic is founded on conventions and assumptions about the world. Venn’s article took the first step toward an interesting novelty in his mature position: the appearance of a form of conventionalism, which someone like Frege would revolt against but which was to win many supporters, albeit in a different incarnation.

The central conventions to be decided on concerned the existence of objects. In addition to things universally accepted or rejected to exist, there were many other things whose existence was either doubtful or controversial. “Three hundred years ago,” Venn wrote, “the dragon and unicorn were ‘things’ in this sense, and the black swan was not; now their positions are reversed. Is the sea-serpent a thing?”84 There were by and large four alternatives; to give up the idea that names stood for things, to admit that a “thing” need not have an actual existence, to decide from time to time what did and what did not exist, or to exclude names from logic altogether. Venn defended the third option. “We have as logicians, when asked to declare what is the denotation of any term, to draw a clear line dividing entities into the real and the imaginary, and to forget that any such arrangement is altogether relative, not merely to the age in which we live, but in some respect to the society with which we happen to mingle.”85 This decision on a convention for (“logical”) existence had implications for many parts of logic. One example is that of classes. Unlike the conceptualist, the material logician accepts no empty classes; it must always be possible to find members “to put into them.”86 Another example is that of the existential import of propositions, such as “All A is B” or “No C is D.” In this case, Venn made “a convention for convenience sake,” writing that in the former case the subject and predicate implied the existence of their objects, whereas in the latter case the subject had to exist, but the predicate did not because “negation does not carry existence with it.”87 The fact that neither the former nor the latter could be converted (e.g., “All A is B” into “No not-B is A”) without an appeal to experience Venn illustrated in the context of the quantification of the predicate. Looking at this theory through a material lens, Venn reasoned that “in general, there is nothing in the form [of the sentence] to show whether we are referring to the whole or a part of the predicate; if therefore we render [the] quantification definite, we are outstepping our data unless we make a renewed appeal to experience.”88 Taken together, rather than claiming an “objectivity unattainable at present,” the material logician should become a conventionalist and frankly admit that “our processes and results in Logic are conditioned on every side by subjective or relative considerations. Our logical machinery and technical phraseology can only be interpreted by the help of numerous assumptions or conventions; relative, not merely to human intelligence in general but, more narrowly, to the amount and distribution of knowledge of the persons who have to use the Logic.”89 Venn was moving away from Mill, entering uncharted territory.

Review of Sigwart’s Logik (1879)

Venn’s second review for Mind discussed the German philosopher Christoph Sigwart’s Logik. The book was an example of nineteenth-century post-Kantian logic, covering—in the first volume of 1873—formal logic and—in the second edition reviewed by Venn—what is usually called scientific methodology (or Wissenschaftslehre). Under the latter, Sigwart, as well as others standing in this largely forgotten tradition, included such topics as the relation between the various natural sciences, the role of observation and theory in scientific experiments, and more general philosophical matters, which would today be labeled as epistemological. Venn struggled to characterize the work for an English audience. “Perhaps,” he wrote, “if we were to call him Kantian . . . we should mislead less than by using any other familiar designation.”90 Despite the fact that Sigwart’s book was “thoroughly conceptualist,” even “anti-material” and “anti-empirical,” Venn found its discussion of the postulates necessary to apply scientific method to the world—namely, time, space, number, and causation—both “suggestive” and highly “instructive.”91 Venn accepted that his positive judgment could be read as a de facto support of the beast called “German philosophy.”

There was one major point on which Venn disagreed with Sigwart. This was the criticism, later voiced more influentially by, among others, Bradley, Frege, and Husserl, against Mill’s naturalistic psychologism, especially the use he made of it in his uniformity-of-nature justification of induction. Far from seeing Mill as a psychologistic logician, Venn believed that the material view of logic had to be supplemented with psychological assumptions. Venn, following his own pragmatist view of belief and action, argued that these assumptions were to be justified, not with reference to innate features of the individual’s mind, but to his visible behavior.

Review of Macfarlane’s Principles of the Algebra of Logic (1879)

Some three months after his review of Sigwart’s Logik, Venn published a short review of an essay on algebraic logic by the Scottish logician, physicist, and mathematician Alexander Macfarlane. Principles of the Algebra of Logic was written “on the lines of Boole,” though Macfarlane “differed freely on various points, more or less of detail, from that great originator of the subject.”92 Venn disagreed with those points that he believed arose out of Macfarlane’s presentation of Boole’s system as “less sound and general” than it actually was.93 But Venn did agree with Macfarlane on one major point. Boole had argued that his system admits of two possible interpretations: a logic of classes and a logic of propositions, where the symbols 1 and 0 stand for truth and falsity, respectively. Much has been made of this second interpretation, since it can be taken to suggest that Boole anticipated Frege’s notion of truth functions, standing at the heart of propositional logic. Following Macfarlane, Venn found the distinction “perplexing” and dismissed the interpretation of terms as propositions.94 Venn justified his opinion that term or class logic was more fundamental than propositional logic by referring to the fact Boole had shown that the “secondary interpretation” could be reduced to what he called the “primary interpretation.” Hence, Venn concluded, the “practical importance” of the second interpretation “dwindles down.”95 Somewhat confusingly, however, Venn seems to have rejected the way in which Boole had carried out this reduction, namely by equating classes with the times at which they are true, and then construing propositions as claims about these classes. Again, Venn’s was, indeed, an opinionated view of algebraic logic based on an interpretation of Boole’s “true” intentions.

The review of Macfarlane’s book contained one other interesting point. Venn emphasized, for the very first time, the educational significance of logical reasoning by calculation. Jevons had been one of the first to recognize that the newly developed systems of symbolic logic lent itself to De Morgan’s suggestion for mechanization. Taking Boole’s work as the point of departure, Jevons had constructed a “logical abacus,” which was to be handled manually and with considerable knowledge of the new logic to make deductions. Venn showed a decided interest in the “machine,” asking in a letter to Jevons in March 1876 whether he could show it to his students at Cambridge.96 One of the original features of Macfarlane’s book, according to Venn, were its proposals for “the numerical treatment of logical questions.”97 Although he still believed that no “special logical calculus” was needed in everyday life, Venn did recognize the educational and even societal importance of the “reduction to rule and principle” of the process of reasoning and the validity of arguments.98

“Symbolic Logic” (1880)

At some point in 1879, the editor of the American Princeton Review offered Venn the opportunity to write another piece on Boole’s Laws of Thought, “couched in a popular style.”99 Following largely the same strategy as in “Boole’s logical system” (1876), Venn coined the influential term symbolic logic to refer to algebraic logic, serving two purposes: first, to overcome common prejudice against Boole’s work as “a theory of mathematical logic” or a “branch of mathematics”;100 and, second, to show that as one highly technical part of the general theory of human reasoning, to which also belonged induction, symbolic logic supplemented rather than replaced traditional syllogistic logic.101

Venn found the main distinction between traditional and algebraic logic in their treatment of “S,” the class represented by the subject term, and “P,” the class represented by the predicate term. Traditional logic used symbols for classes, considered in terms of their denotation and connotation, and recognized a distinction between “S” and “P.” Symbolic logic, on the other hand, took only the denotation of classes into account and made no categorical distinction between “S” and “P.” From these features, Venn drew two conclusions. First, since it is narrower and less fundamental than traditional logic, symbolic logic is not a substitute for that logic. It is merely a method that, by making use of mathematics, fulfills certain purposes for which traditional logic is inadequate:

For the training of ordinary thought,—the traditional rules, definitions, and distinctions are of inestimable value. Employing as they do the propositions of ordinary life, they meet the difficulties of thought very nearly on their own ground. . . . The function of symbolic logic [is] very different. . . . Before it can take account of a proposition on reasoning it has to transmute it not only into its own symbols, but . . . into its own conceptions. When this is done, its power over its data is . . . superior to that gained by the old method.102

Secondly, even though symbolic logic used mathematical symbols to represent classes and operations on classes (addition, division, etc.), it kept “wholly to the sphere of logic, and though borrowing a sign for convenience from another science, we shall put an interpretation entirely of our own upon it.”103 Just as the choice between traditional and symbolic logic, the choice of mathematical symbols was purely a matter of convenience. Taken together, symbolic logic was logical, and a logic, “by a double right, both positively and negatively”: positively, because what it did was to generalize ordinary logical processes, and, negatively, because, insofar as it had nothing to do with “number, or shape, or direction,” what it did fell outside the realm of mathematics.104 That is to say that for Venn, the freedom of algebraic logic from arithmetic did not point to its independent status as an algebra with different possible interpretations; instead, it suggested that its “suggesting science” was and would always be traditional logic.

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During the period between the years 1874 and 1880, Venn combined the teaching of courses in logic for the Moral Sciences Tripos with the publication of a stream of journal articles and reviews in which he explored the two poles of mid-nineteenth-century British logic: the Aristotelian (or “Whatelyian”) and the Baconian, the deductive and the inductive, the formal and the material, the algebraic and the scientific. Venn’s own position on the logical landscape of the time had not yet entirely crystallized—this would, in fact, never happen: nowhere in his entire oeuvre did Venn directly confront, let alone resolve, the tension between his commitments to the projects of Mill and Boole. Perhaps even more than in his second and third books, however, Venn’s papers do give significant clues about his outlook. On the one hand, Venn maintained the material view that all reasoning is ultimately grounded in induction. Unlike Mill, however, he believed that induction itself is not grounded entirely in observations of facts but on certain assumptions and conventions about the world and the human mind. On the other hand, Venn was enthusiastic about the recent innovations that took part of deductive logic beyond its Aristotelian borders, though he himself hesitated to accept nonsyllogistic forms of deduction. Unlike Boole, however, he was not a conceptualist, and unlike Jevons, he did not believe that algebraic logic replaced traditional logic. Venn’s conventionalism allowed him to maintain that the new and the old logic could exist side by side. A “nonconceptualist” interpretation of algebraic logic was a harder nut to crack. Already in the 1870s, Venn’s strategy seems to have been the following: the premises of arguments are the result of inductive inference; once the premises are in place, traditional and algebraic logic provide the means to determine what can be deduced from them. Importantly, this says that no new knowledge can ever arise from deductive reasoning and that it is impossible to reduce induction to deduction. It would form the kernel of Venn’s original treatment of “existential import,” which turned out to be fundamental for his own system of symbolic or algebraic logic.

Over the course of the 1880s, Venn published two bulky textbooks—Symbolic Logic and The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic—in which he worked out the main features and implications of this idiosyncratic position in more detail. These books are taken up in the next chapters.

9

Algebraic Logic

(1881)

Venn’s Symbolic Logic (1881) was the 450-page outcome of a two-decade-long attempt to make sense of algebraic logic. The book appeared at a time when the Boolean reform of logic, after some thirty years of silence and miscomprehension, was finally beginning to materialize. Venn brought Boole’s work into contact with his Continental predecessors and his British, American, and German followers and competitors. From this followed the book’s two main goals: to argue that Boole’s originality was not so complete as was commonly supposed and to defend Boole’s system in its integrity, questioning the modifications of Peirce, Schröder, and J. Neville Keynes and protesting against the alternatives of Jevons, MacColl, and Frege. The overarching aim, however, was to show, allegedly for the very first time, what algebraic logic really was: a logic. Not the logic, but a logic; not an application or a part of mathematics, but “one peculiar development” of traditional logic.1 Venn presented himself as a “stout defender” and “admirer” of Boole, more Boolean than Boole ever was: Venn’s symbolic logic did what Venn believed Boole had wanted to do.2 Rather than a mere monument to Boole, however, Venn’s Symbolic Logic had several original features: among other things, it introduced a new theory of existential import, a new proposal for a reasoning machine and the famous diagrammatic representation of logical propositions that would come to bear Venn’s name.

The revival of logic in England had led to an increase in logic teaching at universities, but most of it was of the Victorian-Aristotelian kind, with a very modest use of symbols. It was mostly due to Venn that Boole’s logic began to gain attention in Cambridge, where courses in elementary and advanced logic were offered within the Moral Sciences Tripos. Venn distilled his lectures into the first edition of Symbolic Logic. The book did for algebraic logic what The Logic of Chance did for probability theory: it put it on the philosophical agenda at Cambridge, where it would attract the attention of W. E. Johnson, who would read the draft of the second edition (1894), and a young student named Bertrand Russell.

Origins

Venn had been introduced to Boole’s Investigation of the Laws of Thought of 1854 through his old mathematics tutor Todhunter in 1858, around the time of taking Holy Orders. A “young man who had read something of mathematics, but next to nothing of philosophy or logic,” Venn could initially barely follow the “mere mechanisms of [its] processes,” but the impression left on his mind by the book was one of “bewildered admiration”:

It appeared to him [Venn is writing in the third person, LV] as if he had had put into his hands the key of all knowledge. A few symbols were arranged; processes were performed on paper, some of which had, and some not, an analogy to what goes on in the mind when thinking, and a result was reached, and finally interpreted, which it did not appear could ever have been attained by the natural and unassisted functions of thought. The analogy of astronomy and other mathematico-physical sciences then suggested that there might be vast regions of knowledge awaiting discovery, and which would soon be got at deductively; and that hence a general march forwards along the whole line was imminent, leading to results comparable with those which the older and more special calculus of mathematics had given in the hands of Newton and his various successors.3

Venn’s young man’s dreams of “mental conquest” had soon been dispelled by the down-to-earth reflection characteristic of the British empiricist that he was. He realized “how short and simple the deductive processes are, in which logic can directly help us” and how “tedious and complicated those preliminary processes of attaining data are, in which logic can merely give an indirect assistance.”4 Like Herschel, Mill, and many others before him, Venn was convinced that this preliminary process, the creative and gradual process of bringing together observed facts and ideas, was what really mattered. It could never be reduced to formal, mechanical laws. Likewise, no amount of deduction could ever lead to new knowledge about the world. This is what Boole and, especially, Jevons misunderstood: since algebraic logic is “a purely Formal Science,” the attempt to make it bear on induction or even scientific method is a “grave error,” combining completely “heterogeneous materials.”5 Nonetheless, Boole’s work continued to intrigue Venn, and in 1862 he began his attempt to come to terms with (his own interest in) Boole’s calculus of deductive reasoning.6 Only after a third or fourth study of the Laws of Thought in 1878–79 was Venn able to do what “no one,” not even the “professed logician” Jevons, had done at the time: to show that algebraic logic does not replace traditional logic but is a “generalized Formal Logic” that greatly improves the facility and power with which deductive logical problems can be solved.7

During the year 1880, Venn published some five articles, respectively in Mind (July), Philosophical Magazine (July), Princeton Review (September), and Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society (December), in which he worked out the theoretical, historical, and practical aspects of his take on Boole’s work. All these articles would appear as chapters in Symbolic Logic in rewritten and enlarged form and reflected interests that Venn had developed over the course of the 1870s: in addition to recent English, French, and German work on formal and algebraic logic, there was the “logical abacus,” aimed at mechanizing deductive reasoning, and the collection of rare and old works on formal logic.8 Many of the drafts for the chapters were read to and discussed with friends and fellow lecturers, Sidgwick, James Ward, and J. Neville Keynes at Cambridge, and George Croom Robertson in London. Venn had become a professional and expert logician, and in Symbolic Logic he initiated that “tendency of symbolic logicians,” in contrast with philosophers, who were soon to be divided by the notorious analytic/Continental divide, “to form a single international community.”

Symbolic Logic: Formal Machinery

Symbolic Logic appeared in the spring of 1881, some thirty years after Boole’s Laws of Thought, which had never seen a second edition. Jevons, Venn, and a few others had written about Boole in the 1860s and 1870s, but by the early 1880s algebraic logic was still both “novel” and “repugnant” to the majority of logicians and a “hobby” for Venn.9 In the preface, Venn even apologized to his reader for devoting an entire book to what was, after all, only “one peculiar development of Logic.”10 The introduction, which would be reproduced almost unaltered in the second edition of 1894, explained the nature and aim of algebraic logic along the lines of his papers from the 1870s. Venn situates himself carefully between the two camps in deductive logic: the formal and the algebraic logicians. On the one hand, the introduction of mathematics into logic is defended against the traditional sentiments of Baynes and Spalding. On the other hand, Boole’s and Jevons’s conceptualism is rejected, as is De Morgan’s and Jevons’s claim that algebraic logic replaces traditional logic. “The old-fashioned Logic,” Venn wrote, “should be no more regarded as superseded by the generalizations of the Symbolic System than is Euclid by those of Analytical Geometry.”11 Venn also includes a sneer at Hamilton’s “petty reforms,” represented by the quantification of the predicate, which “seem to me to secure the advantages of neither system. We cut ourselves loose from the familiar forms of speech, and yet we do not secure in return any of the advantages of wide generalization.”12

Venn’s justification of the logical use of mathematical symbols deserves notice since it shows that algebraic logic was also a result of a broader change in thinking about formal science in Britain in the early nineteenth century. Venn refers to the “accidental dependence of the Symbolic Logic upon Mathematics” and the “principle of the transfer of signification.”13 The first point said that there is nothing mathematical about algebraic logic and that mathematical symbols are just convenient tools for what could also have been achieved before these symbols were even available.14 The second point was that algebraic logic could be expressed in terms of mathematical symbols without thereby becoming a branch of mathematics. This was possible on account of the fact that the same symbol can take on different meanings in different fields of study. Because this principle was not widely known outside the field of mathematics, where it originally arose, its use in logic might lead to confusion:

When people meet with such an expression as x + y in a work which is professedly logical, they are apt to say to themselves, “This is a mathematical symbol: the author is diverging into mathematics. . . .” What such objectors must be understood to mean . . . is of course that (+) is the sign of addition in Arithmetic. . . ; but they should not confound Arithmetic with the whole of mathematics. Even to go no further than Algebra, we find that (+) has already extended its signification, having come to include ordinary subtraction, in case the quantity to which it is prefixed has itself a negative value.15

Venn liked to think of his Symbolic Logic as doing for logic what others before him had done for algebra: to establish a calculus in entire independence of arithmetic. Boole’s position was different: he presented his calculus as a nonquantitative algebra that he called “logical” because he understood by mathematics any language of pure symbols. According to Venn, mathematics and logic were like two “branches of one language of symbols, which possess some, though very few, laws of combination in common.”16 Hence Venn’s preference for the name symbolic (rather than algebraic or mathematical) logic.

As C. J. Monro—the Trinity polymath whom Venn thanked in the preface—wrote in his review for Mind, Symbolic Logic is neither “a new system” nor a “text-book of an old one,” but an “essay on the conditions of any symbolical system of [equational] class-term logic.”17 Jevons said pretty much the same in his review for Nature, where he noted that as far as Venn was concerned every logician should “uphold Boole’s system in its integrity,” which had now become not merely the “corner-stone” of logic but logical “orthodoxy.”18 What Kant had believed about Aristotle, Venn held to be true of Boole: his logic was essentially finished. All innovations over Boole were therefore dismissed as throwing logic back into its “ante-Boolian confusion.”19

Algebraic Logic

The bulk of Symbolic Logic was a commentary on the Laws of Thought. Following Boole, Venn presented algebraic logic as a logic of equations between extensional classes. This immediately distanced him from both MacColl and Frege, for whom implication is more central than the equation, and from Jevons, whose equational logic is intensional. Venn went to great lengths to show that algebraic logic does not replace traditional logic but “pushes to the utmost limits” its Aristotelian subject matter—terms, propositions, and inferences—seen under the aspect of denotation and replacing predication of two terms for part-whole relations between any number of class terms. According to Venn, this was the only way in which traditional logic could be generalized, and Boole had shown how it was to be carried out.

The main chapters of Symbolic Logic read as a translation of the canonical objects of logic into a symbolic language, which is shown to be analogous to but not the same as that of arithmetic. Venn first gives symbols for class terms (X, Y, Z); symbols for the different ways in which class terms can be combined (+, −, ×, ÷); symbols for the universal class “1,” the empty class “0,” and the indefinite class “v”; and the equation symbol (=) to express a proposition. On this basis, Venn shows how the ordinary propositions of traditional logic can be expressed in symbolic language and argues that algebraic logic goes beyond traditional logic in terms of generality and insight into the logical structure of propositions. For example, “All X is Y” can be expressed either as X not-Y = 0 (“No X is not-Y”) or, following Boole, as x = vy. With only two class terms X and Y, the scheme of propositional forms of algebraic logic consists of twelve rather than the traditional four elementary statements.

Venn then gives a two-step logical analysis: development, which is the preliminary to reasoning, and logical equations and interpreting and solving logical equations, which are said to correspond to propositions and inferences. Following Boole, Venn takes what he variously calls development, expansion, subdivision, or continued dichotomization as the very foundation of deductive reasoning. Venn understands this process to be a generalization of the traditional notion of dichotomy, that is, the logical division of classes (exemplified by the Tree of Porphyry). It has two features: first, the subclasses or compartments must be mutually exclusive (that means that they should not contain common individuals); and, second, the subclasses or compartments must be collectively exhaustive (that means that all the individuals of the divided class should be in either subclass or compartment). With two classes, X and Y, there are four subdivisions: the X that is Y, the X that is not Y, the Y that is not X, and that which is neither X nor Y. “At this point,” Venn remarks, “common Logic mostly stops in practice. It is clear however that we have thus made but a single step along a path where indefinite progress is possible. Each of the classes or compartments produced equally admits of subdivision in respect of y, whatever y may be; and so on without limit.”20 The operation of development, which in its symbolic form was “one of the grand steps of generalization introduced by Boole,” provides the raw material for the statement of every logical proposition that can be formed with any given number of class terms.21 Take the example of xy + not-y z:

[Here] the term xy admits of no further subdivision . . . as regards either x or y; for it is xy most unmistakeably, and can therefore yield no term of the not-x or not-y description. Accordingly, the only subdivision open to it is in respect of z, viz. into xyz, and xy not-z. Similarly not-x z admits only of subdivision in respect of y, and yields the terms not-x y z and not-x not-y z. And here of course the process stops, for we are only supposed to have the three terms x, y, and z, before us. Indeed they are the only terms entering into the given expression. Accordingly the result of the process is given by xyz + xy not-z + not-x yz + not-x not-y z.22

Next came logical equations and their solution. Together, these make up what Venn calls the analytic part of reasoning, whereby a complex whole is taken apart to its constituent elements. Given an equation (or a group of equations), the goal is to extract from it “the sum-total of what it has to tell us,” that is, all that is implied in it. This is done by breaking it up into all its “ultimate” and “mutually exclusive elements,” through development, and then to see what conclusions can be drawn from these, through elimination.23 Venn described the two processes for different kinds of equations, emphasizing that it is “a matter of our own choice” whether these are thrown into the categorical, hypothetical, or disjunctive form.24 The completion of the logical problem consists in the synthetic step of showing how the merely negative knowledge yielded by analysis could be turned into new affirmative propositions. At this point, Venn returned to the syllogism, showing how this canonical form of argument looked in algebraic logic. It was an act of homage. “We can syllogize, after a fashion,” he noted, “just as one could drive a stage coach from London to Birmingham along the railroad [even] now that we have engines and carriages.”25

Venn’s presentation was very much in Boole’s spirit. He supported Boole on major points, including a commitment to extensionalism, to the exclusive interpretation of disjunction of classes (in opposition to Robert Grassmann and Jevons, among others), and to using v (or its equivalent 0/0) to represent “some” in the extended sense that admits the possibility of “none.” Some of these points were given up in the second edition of 1894. For example, Venn would there adopt what he called the un- or nonexclusive view of disjunction, mainly because the voting had gone this way, and would discuss the propositional calculus, though without altering his general outlook. Like Boole, and in opposition to many other post-Boolean logicians, Venn always remained fully dedicated to the analogy between logic and mathematics. Jevons, for example, rejected subtraction and division, for which he found no logical analogue. Venn’s project was more or less the opposite of Jevons’s: namely, to make clear that everything about Boole’s system was “purely and entirely logical,” in both its “origin” and its “nature,” and that it remained within reach of the “ordinary logician.”26 This is one reason why Symbolic Logic is more than a commentary on Boole, for Boole himself had done very little to remove the impression that his logical calculus was mathematical. Venn strongly believed that the analogy between logic and mathematics, which made it possible to say that algebraic logic was at once essentially separate from and “accidentally” dependent on mathematics, needed to be justified at every point. He felt the need to point out, for example, that the operations of arithmetic addition and class aggregation are not identical: “We do not add together the English, French, Germans, and so forth in order to make up the Europeans.” Perhaps more than Boole, Venn realized that the inverse operations of subtraction and division are not interpretable in logic without far-reaching auxiliary assumptions, which he discusses at considerable length. The operation of division was especially difficult for Venn because, unlike the other three operations, it was suggested by the symbols themselves rather than by purely logical considerations. His justification is exemplary of his nonmathematical, sometimes almost conversational style of analysis:

We might conceive the symbols conveying the following hint to us: “Look out and satisfy yourselves on logical grounds whether there be not an inverse operation to [multiplication]. We do not say that there is such, though we strongly suggest it. If however you can ascertain its existence, then there is one of our number at your service appropriate to express it. In fact, having chosen one of us to represent your analogue to multiplication, there is another which you are bound in consistency to employ as representative of your analogue to its inverse, division,—supposing it to exist”.27

Even the problem of the solution of groups of complex logical equations was attacked “in the same way as [we] have attacked the previous ones, that is, by first seeing what suggestions our common logical knowledge could offer towards its solution.”28 This bottom-up, or “empirical way,” of approaching algebraic logic forms a bridge to the other original feature of Venn’s theoretical discussion: its attempt to free algebraic logic from Boole’s own conceptualist view of logic, according to which logic is confined to a study of the relations between mental concepts. This crucial and oft-forgotten aspect of Symbolic Logic is best illustrated by his original treatment of the existential import of propositions, both universal and particular. Venn was, in fact, one of the first logicians who directly confronted this issue.

Some of the greatest logicians in the history of logic, such as Aristotle and Leibniz, were heavily concerned with ontology. But “many logicians, if not a majority of them,” Venn pointed out, “have passed the subject by entirely.”29 The reason for such neglect, he suggests, has been the widespread acceptance of conceptualism. Indeed, the topic of the reference of propositions “as regards the actual existence of their subjects and predicates” is essentially “alien” to it.30 Venn rejects this view and poses anew the existential question: does “All X is Y” assert or imply that there are such things as X or Y in the world? Rather than pursuing a metaphysical study of existence, Venn, anticipating the mid-twentieth-century position of W. V. Quine, focuses on logical criteria for the acceptance or rejection of existence claims. This allowed him to present the issue in a general form: regardless of how existence is understood and verified from one universe of discourse to another, the fact is that acceptance or rejection is always a possibility and a real distinction. Whether speaking of the observable world of tables or the imaginary world of unicorns, everyone who utters “All X is Y” must say either “yes” or “no” to the question: “Do you imply that there is any X or Y?” For Venn, existential import is ultimately a matter of ontological commitment on behalf of the speaker. The issue is confronted from three perspectives—everyday language, traditional logic, and algebraic logic—asking how each deals with the utterance of each of the four standard propositional forms A-E-I-O. Venn discusses the first two only to make clear what he is after, namely an analysis of existence claims for logic that can deal with any possible proposition unproblematically and in the exact same way. What Venn suggests is the remarkably prescient view, “almost necessary forced on us by the study of Symbolic Logic,” that “the burden of implication of existence is shifted from the affirmative to the negative form.” For example, given “All X is Y,” which contains two class terms, there are four possible subclasses or compartments: xy, x not-y, y not-x and not-x not-y. What Venn understands “All X is Y” to assert is not that any of these subclasses (say, xy) is actually occupied but that one of them is definitely unoccupied (x not-y). “It is not the existence of the subject or the predicate (in affirmation) which is implied,” Venn claims, “but the non-existence of any subject which does not possess the predicate.” Hence, it is better to write “All X is Y” as “No X is not-Y” for, negatively and absolutely, it says that there are no such things as x not-y, and, positively and conditionally, it says that if there are such things as x, then all the x’s are y.

One implication of this analysis is that within the square of opposition, the assumption that A and E propositions imply I and O propositions does not hold: if none of the subject terms refer, A and E are true while I and O are false. Another major implication is that the common view, defended by Boole, that universal propositions have existential import is rejected. That Boole interpreted universal propositions in this way is clear from the fact that he allowed for inferences that move from the universal to the particular, such that “Some Y are X” might be obtained from “All X are Y.” Venn’s modification would come to be accepted as the official Boolean position, which is actually Boole’s position as amended by Venn. A trickier case—Venn called it “a sore vexation to every thoughtful symbolist”—was that of particular propositions.31 Does “Some X is Y” imply the existence of the subject and predicate? “It can extinguish no class and establish no class, and has therefore no categorical information to give the world,” but on account of the criterion of existential import its characteristic of “really establishing something” must somehow be expressed symbolically. Venn begins by discussing Boole’s 1854 form vx = vy (“Some x’s are some y’s”) but then prefers Boole’s earlier 1847 form, from his Mathematical Analysis of Logic, anticipated by Leibniz, xy = v (“xy is something” or “There is xy”). The fact that v is taken to exclude the value 0, or none, Venn would express as xy > 0 in the second edition. By that time, he no longer characterized particulars as “troublesome,” but he remained of the opinion that these propositions strictly taken did not belong to algebraic logic, since they are “of a somewhat temporary and unscientific character.”32

This raised the crucial question: what is the scope of algebraic logic? What does and what does not belong to it? And, crucially, what does it mean to say that there exists something that falls outside its scope? Venn and other followers of Boole formulated elaborate logical problems so as to show the greater facility of the new as compared with the older logic in solving them. Venn’s pupil J. Neville Keynes would show in his Studies and Exercises in Formal Logic (1884) that these problems were not at all insoluble in traditional logic, suggesting that they were largely artificial problems, unlikely to arise in any real-world situation. Venn himself frankly admitted that traditional logic had many advantages in dealing with the arguments of everyday life. What then was to be done with the technical methods of algebraic logic? The answer that soon came to be generally accepted: analyze mathematical reasoning. However, it was exactly for the kind of arguments prevalent in mathematical proof, such as a reductio ad absurdum, that algebraic logic proved unsuitable. It turned out that another logic, less wedded to the general structure of syllogistic reasoning, was needed. This is what Peirce, Frege, Giuseppe Peano, Russell, and others belonging to the tradition of mathematical logic would provide. Venn, however, never made the leap.

Symbolic Logic: Instruments

At the center of Venn’s Symbolic Logic stood the task of solving logical problems—though it was not entirely clear to Venn whose logical problems. One way to solve such problems was with algebraic methods. Another was with instruments like diagrams and machines. According to Venn, both boiled down to the part-whole analysis of classes as these are subdivided into a collection of mutually exclusive and collective exhaustive subclasses or compartments. “Of course,” Venn mentioned, “in any particular problem we shall most likely not require to make appeal to more than some of these constituents,” but “the existence of all has to be recognized, and a notation provided for every one of them.”33 This was the theoretical state of things that any logical instrument had to meet.

Venn Diagrams

Venn had first hit on the idea of the diagrammatic representation of propositions by inclusive and exclusive circles in the spring or summer of 1862, when he was preparing his lectures on logic for Indian Civil Service candidates. “Of course this device was not new then”—Euler’s two-figure diagram, which had replaced the ancient “Porphyrian tree” and “triangles,” already appeared in the majority of eighteenth-century logical treatises—but “it was so obviously representative of the way in which any one, who approached the subject from the mathematical side, would attempt to visualize propositions, that it was forced upon me almost at once.”34 Like Francis Galton, Alfred Marshall, and other wranglers of his generation, Venn had been educated in the Cambridge tradition of geometrical mathematics, rooted in Newton’s Principia and advocated by Whewell, which soon turned into “a habit of trying to rationalize & visualize things.”35 It was one of the typical “ways of ‘wranglers,’” and Venn passed it on to his own moral sciences students. Another motivation was didactic. “If any sluggish imagination did not at once realise that from ‘All A is B’, ‘No B is any C’, we could infer that ‘No A is any C’ he has only to trace the circles, and he sees it as clearly as anyone sees the results of a physical experiment.”36 At the end of the 1870s, when he returned to the study of Boole, Venn innovated Euler’s diagrams by putting them on another basis and extending them to more complex sets of propositions than, say, “All Y is X, some X is not Y.”37 Venn diagrams were invented to improve Euler’s plan and to give visual expressions to Boole’s generalization of traditional logic. They were to show that what can be done symbolically can also be done visually: to find what conclusion follows from a given set of premises. Venn’s “new scheme of diagrammatic notation” made complex deductive reasoning, with up to five class terms, “sensible to the eye” in the form of a “coup d’oeil.”38

Venn published three papers on logical diagrams in 1880, respectively in Mind (July), Philosophical Magazine (July), and Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society (December). These papers appeared as (parts of) chapters in the 1881 book. Venn’s “On the Employment of Geometrical Diagrams for the Sensible Representation of Logical Propositions”—an early fruit of his collection of rare and old works on logic started early in the 1870s—provided a criticism of the diagrams found in Euler’s “Letters to a German Princess.”39 The main shortcoming of Euler diagrams is here said to be twofold. First, like the Hamiltonian or class inclusion and exclusion view of the proposition to which they are attached, they did not “naturally harmonize with the propositions of ordinary life or ordinary logic.”40 On the one hand, Euler diagrams are unable to express doubt or uncertainty about the mutual relation between classes (e.g., in the case of “All X is Y,” whether X comprises the whole of Y) characteristic of the bulk of common propositions. On the other hand, a simple proposition such as “All X is Y” needs two diagrams because if “All X is Y” is true it is still possible that there are Y’s that are not X. Without any further information, it is impossible to say which of the two diagrams actually represents the proposition.41 Second, Euler diagrams are unable to deal with problems other than the three-term, two-premise syllogisms of Aristotle, and, most importantly, they can be drawn only after a problem has been solved. “What is exhibited is the final outcome of the . . . actual exclusion or inclusion of the classes. We cannot represent . . . the steps by which we attain to complete information.”42 What Venn looked for in diagrams was an aid in working out a conclusion from premises in cases of complex logical arguments. After briefly following the Bohemian mathematician-philosopher Bernard Bolzano in working with modified Euler diagrams, Venn concluded that an entirely new plan was needed. After “some consideration” he hit on “a more hopeful scheme of diagrammatic representation,” suggested by Boole’s so-called compartmental view of the proposition and the fundamental method of generalized class division:

Whereas the Eulerian plan endeavoured at once and directly to represent propositions, or relations of class terms to one another, we shall find it best to begin by representing only classes, and then proceed to modify these in some way so as to make them indicate what our propositions have to say. How, then, shall we represent all the subclasses which two or more class terms can produce? . . . All that we have to do is to draw our figures, say circles, so that each successive [subdivision] which we introduce shall intersect once, and once only, all the subdivisions already existing, and we then have what may be called a general framework indicating every possible combination producible by the given class terms.43

Euler diagrams directly represent the actual relation of classes expressed in a proposition. Venn’s major innovation was to start by drawing a primary diagram, which represents all possible subclasses or compartments obtained by intersecting the class terms, and only then adding distinctive marks to represent propositions according to the emptiness or occupation of the subclasses. (At one point, Venn suggested that, in order to “save a few minutes,” a stamp could be made so that the graph paper for the diagrams was always ready to hand. The proposal was similar to what Jevons in 1874 had called his “logical slate.”)44 For Venn, overlapping circles do not represent a proposition, but only the framework into which propositions can be fitted. Thus, for example, in the case of diagrams for two or three terms, the two or three intersecting circles created four or eight subclasses for the combinations resulting from the subdivision of the terms (see figures 9.1a–b). “Put a finger upon any compartment, and we have a symbolic name provided for it; mention the name, and there can be no doubt as to the compartment thereby referred to.”45 For diagrams for four or five terms, Venn uses, respectively, overlapping ellipses (giving fifteen subclasses, plus the region outside of all the ellipses) and a combination of overlapping ellipses and an annulus-shaped region, with a hole in the middle (giving all thirty-two subclasses needed) (see figures 9.1c–d). Venn also briefly toyed with another basic format, using nonsymmetrical figures “distasteful to any but the mathematician” for four or more terms: beginning with the three-term diagram, a horseshoe-shaped figure is added whose outline divides each subclass it passes through into exactly two subclasses (see figure 9.1e).46

9.1 Venn diagrams for two, three, four, and five terms and an example of the horseshoe method. From Venn’s Symbolic Logic (1881), 104–7, and “On the Diagrammatic and Mechanical Representation of Propositions and Reasonings” (1880), 8.

Venn’s diagrams were a balancing act between the demands of logic, mathematics, and everyday life—or, that is, of rigor and usefulness. Venn argues that his new plan is capable of theoretical extension to any number of terms, writing that there is “nothing to prevent us from going on for ever drawing successive figures.”47 Indeed, he provided an inductive method for constructing continuous diagrams for any number of terms. He stopped at five terms, mentioning six terms only in a footnote, simply because he was convinced that the “visual aid” for which diagrams exist is soon lost when going further.48 Furthermore, he seems to have reasoned, there are, after all, very few real-life situations in which one has to deal with arguments involving, say, fourteen terms.

Venn’s next step was to use diagrams to represent propositions instead of terms. He did this by adding shading to the subclasses. Venn knew that others had done the same, for already in the 1881 edition of Symbolic Logic he notes that Schröder (in 1877) and Macfarlane (in 1879) had shaded diagrams, albeit only to draw attention to one or the other subclass. The second edition of the book added further reference to Josef Mich (1871) and especially to Hermann Scheffler, whose Naturgesetze (1876–80) essentially developed the diagrammatic plan that Venn published independently in that same year.49 Unlike any of these logicians, Venn gave diagrams propositional significance by means of his new theory of existential import. Given that a proposition is represented in terms of the subclasses that it denies (or “destroys”), shading a subclass means that it is known to be empty, whereas subclasses without shading indicate a temporary lack of knowledge. “How widely different this plan is from that of the old-fashioned Eulerian diagrams will be readily seen,” wrote Venn:

One great advantage consists in the ready way in which it lends itself to the representation of successive increments of knowledge as one proposition after another is taken into account, instead of demanding that we should endeavour to represent the net result of them all at a stroke. . . . We simply shade out the compartments in our figure which [are] successively declared empty, [and] nothing is easier than to go on doing this till all the information furnished by the data is exhausted.50

Venn illustrated his plan for several syllogisms and showed that it could express complex cases much more easily and clearer than Euler diagrams. Take

All x is either y and z, or not-y

If any xy is z, then it is w

No wx is yz

and suppose that the task is to exhibit the relation of x and y. The first step is to draw the four-ellipse figure and to analyze the premises in order to see what subclasses are destroyed by them: the first premise destroys “xy not-z,” the second xyz not-w, and the third wxyz. The spatial compartments that represent these three subclasses are then shaded out such that the following diagrammatic answer arises: “All xy” having been done away with, x and y must be mutually exclusive (“No x is y”) (see figure 9.2).

9.2 Venn diagram for “No x is y.” (“Consider the following—All x is either y and z, or not y / If any xy is z, then it is w / No wx is yz; and suppose we are asked to exhibit the relation of x and y to one another as regards their inclusion and exclusion.”) From Symbolic Logic (1881), 117.

Venn ended his chapter on diagrams in Symbolic Logic with the remark that the diagrammatic plan and the symbolic plan were “in complete correspondence and harmony with each other.”51 Interestingly, he remained completely silent about particular propositions. Soon after the publication the book, however, Venn addressed the need to find a diagrammatic representation for particulars—those “hindrances” that had already proved so hard to express symbolically.52 Even then, he was ambiguous and hesitating in dealing with them.

As Venn wrote in his 1883 review for Mind of C. S. Peirce’s students’ Studies in Logic (1883): “I have suggested elsewhere a plan for . . . representing any combination of universals. . . . If we introduce particular propositions also, we must of course employ some additional form of diagrammatical notation.”53 The problem was familiar and straightforward: universal propositions destroy classes, but particular propositions only save classes. The former are easy to represent because destruction is distributive: the destruction of a subclass implies the loss of all its further subdivisions. The latter are much more difficult because saving is only alternative or partial: when a subclass is saved this does not mean that all its further subdivisions are saved too. For example, “No x is y” destroys not merely xy but also xyz and xy not-z, if z is to be taken account of. But “Some x is y,” saving a part of xy, does not say whether such part is xyz or xy not-z. Hence, what is needed is a third kind of indication, or distinctive mark, in addition to the shading and leaving blank of compartments. “We must be able to show,” Venn wrote in Nature in 1887, “that a compartment is empty, that it is occupied, or that we do not know what is its state.”54 Venn’s proposal in the 1883 review was to draw a bar across saved subclasses, such that “Some x are y” could be represented with a horizontal line through compartment xy. Although distinctive lines were needed to keep track of what compartments were alternatively saved in the case of several particular propositions, the method acquired some local success as it was adopted by two other Cambridge logicians, J. N. Keynes (in 1894) and W. E. Johnson (in 1921).55 Venn would refer to it in a note of 1887 in Nature, but in the end, he was not happy with the method and abandoned it in the second edition of Symbolic Logic.56 There, Venn wrote that the representation of particular propositions by means of his diagrams unavoidably went hand in hand with “a certain loss of elegance and simplicity.”57 Venn’s first suggestion was to use two kinds of shading: vertical for destroyed compartments and horizontal for saved compartments. Because there were only so many easily distinguishable other kinds of shadings—which would be needed when more propositions were added—Venn subsequently proposed to replace these shadings by numerals (1, 2, 3, . . .). His idea was to number particular propositions and to mark the subclasses saved by each of them with its corresponding number (see figure 9.3). Venn adopted this numbering method in the 1894 edition of his Symbolic Logic, where he used it to solve complex logical problems with so-called Marquand diagrams, whose superiority in such cases he recognized. When only one particular proposition was to be represented, Venn there sometimes uses a star or a cross to mark the nonemptiness of a compartment—in Symbolic Logic on a Marquand diagram and in a letter to Lewis Carroll on one of his own diagrams.58

9.3 Venn’s example of using numerals to mark compartments. From Symbolic Logic (1894), 132.

Much like Euler, Venn would always feel uneasy about his diagrammatic method of representing particular propositions. And like Boole, Venn would never be entirely satisfied with his symbolic way of expressing them. As Alexander Macfarlane, who also worked on diagrams himself, noted with disappointment in his 1881 review of Symbolic Logic, Venn almost completely “restricts himself generally to what may be called universal propositions.”59 Venn held the key ideas for the satisfactory representation of particular propositions with symbols and diagrams and was prepared to deviate somewhat from Boole in order to express them, but he kept with Boolean tradition in minimizing their importance. During the 1880s and 1890s, other logicians such as C. S. Peirce and Lewis Carroll would improve on Venn’s diagrams, in this regard. Carroll’s case is interesting, since he did not know of Venn diagrams when he was inventing his own. His rectangular diagrams, first published in the Game of Logic (1886), were Venn-type diagrams, in the sense that they too represented classes first, then propositions, but Carroll’s approach was different from that of Venn. For example, he started by representing the universe of discourse, and he was able to construct visually satisfactory diagrams for more than four terms. The main advantage of Carroll’s diagrams was only visual, not theoretical: they were never actually used to solve a problem involving more than three terms. Although Venn knew of Carroll’s diagrams, and the two knew each other through correspondence, he never mentioned them in his published works.

Logical Machines

During the 1870s, Venn had become interested in the use before a student audience of Jevons’s logical machine (1869), the successor of the logical abacus (1865), which showed “the working of Boole’s Logic in a half mechanical manner.”60 These devices, which were like small keyboard instruments or cash registers, are today honored as early computers. Somewhere in March 1876 Venn asked Jevons, whom he had first met two years before on the way from Vossevangen to Hardangerfjord, Norway, whether he could borrow the three-feet-tall logical machine to show his student how its keys, pins, levers, and rods could together be used to perform the process of logical deduction with up to four terms. “Where is your Logical Machine to be got? & does it entirely supersede the Abacus?” wrote Venn on 25 March: “I am going to lecture on these symbolic methods next term & want to find out as much as I can about them meanwhile.”61 “I would offer to send it, only it will not bear travelling,” Jevons replied, adding that he would be happy to send the abacus instead; this device could do “all that the machine can, and more, as it takes in five terms,” but it was more “troublesome” to use since the ledges, wooden slips, and wire pins had to be handled manually.62 Venn had no idea that Jevons’s machines were unique “in these days of logical reading & lecturing & examining”; even though he did not suppose that they could be bought at “country stationers,” he thought that there would at least be a few available in London.63

Venn evidently appreciated the didactic value of Jevons’s “mechanical appliances,” but he did not have a “high estimate” of any further promise.64 For Venn, the aid of diagrams was primary, that of logical machines merely “additional” and “very slight”; indeed, “so very little trouble is required to sketch out a fresh diagram . . . that it is really not worth while to get a machine to do any part of the work.”65 Venn discussed logical machines in his Symbolic Logic only to argue that those who did have much interest in them had not recognized the nature and limits of the aid that they provided. Unlike Jevons, and the entire tradition of calculus ratiocinator, tracing from Ramon Lull and Leibniz through Babbage and De Morgan, Venn refused to speculate on the mechanical character of the human mind, the mechanization of reasoning, or the deduction of truths about the world. “It is but a very small part of the entire process, which goes to form a piece of reasoning, which [machines] are capable of performing.”66 Jevons, for his part, never even mentioned the significance of Venn diagrams, either as a visual representation of Boole’s logic or as a way of solving logical problems. It is yet another instance of their growing rivalry. Venn and Jevons, arguably the two most prominent English logicians from the 1860s to 1880s, worked on the exact same topics in logic but almost always in a completely different, if not opposing, way.

Despite his scruples, Venn did develop a plan for a logical machine somewhat similar to that of Jevons. In addition to his diagram stamps, Venn suggested creating a figure on a cardboard and cutting out the compartments while leaving the boundary lines so that the compartments were like pieces of a children’s puzzle. When starting with all the pieces in their original place, instead of shading the empty compartments, the pieces that represent nonexistent subclasses are removed. At the end of the game, the pieces left behind show all the remaining combinations of subclasses. Venn then sketched, briefly and without much detail, the construction of a device that he believed to be able to do “all that can be rationally expected of any logical machine.”67 What Venn called his logical-diagram machine was, strictly taken, simply a three-dimensional version of the puzzle. It was five and six inches square and three inches deep; the pieces—all equipped with labeled pins—were to be dropped through a hole instead of being removed like the puzzle pieces (see figure 9.4). Francis Galton, who told Jevons of its existence in July 1880, called it “a beautiful little thing.”68 Although a remake, the machine had one novel feature; an extra compartment at the top of the ellipses. (Venn noted that it represented the region outside the ellipses, leaving the implied change of meaning of the universe of discourse undiscussed.) Jevons was not the least impressed. He found the device itself remarkable but did not think it was mechanical in the sense he preferred, since the role of the user was too prominent. “The selections of classes have to be guided and judged by the selector, and all that the mechanical arrangements effect is to select a whole class of elliptic segments at one movement of the fingers.”69

9.4 Venn’s logical-diagram machine. From Symbolic Logic (1881), 122.

The second edition of Symbolic Logic also made explicit mention of Allan Marquand’s logical machine, constructed in Princeton in the winter of 1881–82 and described in detail in a paper of 1885. Around that same time, Marquand, a doctoral student of Peirce at Johns Hopkins University who became lecturer in logic (1881–83) and professor of the history of art (1883–1923) at Princeton University, published “On Logical Diagrams for n Terms.” Written in direct response to Venn’s paper of July 1880 in the Philosophical Magazine, Marquand, much like Macfarlane, introduced large squares, subdivided vertically and horizontally into a series of 2n smaller squares, each representing n terms together with their possible combinations, positive and negative.70 Marquand used the square format of his diagram to design a machine in which the sixteen combinations of A, B, C, D, with their negatives a, b, c, d, were represented by indicators or pointers arranged like the squares. At the outset, the indicators all pointed in a horizontal direction to “indicate the state of a logical universe of four terms before the introduction of premises”; when the premises were pressed on a keyboard of eight letter keys and two operation keys (1, 0), the indicators representing the combinations inconsistent with the premises fell to the vertical position.71 Like Peirce, who recommended Marquand use electrical switching circuits for operations, Venn observed that the machine possessed “some mechanical and technical advantages” over Jevons’s logical piano and his own logical-diagram device.72 But Marquand’s machine did not change Venn’s mind about the prospects of machines. Unlike Peirce and other earlier and later pioneers of the computer, Venn remained to see their lack of originality as a weakness rather than a strength. “It is not easy, indeed,” he wrote in 1894, “to conceive how any mechanical device could do more than [the] intermediate work between the original premises and the verbal conclusion.”73 As always, in good Millian fashion, the interesting and fundamental question was how these original premises are obtained in the first place. There was no doubt in Venn’s mind that this was not and would never become merely a matter of mechanized routine.

Venn and the Algebraic Tradition

Venn wrote Symbolic Logic as an admirer of Boole. Like all admirers do, Venn saw what he wanted to see and accused critics of not seeing it. On the one hand, he simply ignored Boole’s own view of his logical calculus as an algebra with two interpretations and rejected the attempts of the post-Boolean logicians Peirce and Schröder to develop the propositional (truth-functional) interpretation. On the other hand, logical innovations that were known to go under, over, and beyond Boole, such as De Morgan’s and Peirce’s logic of relations or Frege’s predicate calculus, were either not recognized as logic or dismissed as an outcome of misunderstanding Boole’s system. The application of mathematics to logic had opened a new logical era. For Venn, that era was to be a Boolean era of a calculus ratiocinator, a calculus of human reasoning, rather than a lingua characteristica, a formal universal language in which everything conceivable can be unambiguously expressed. This distinction would come to play a key role in debates about who fathered modern logic, Boole or Frege.74 Venn of course was on Boole’s side, but since he did not think that Boole had broken with traditional logic, or that Frege did anything original, this whole issue made no sense to him.

Nonetheless Venn’s Symbolic Logic was a milestone in the history of logic, in general, and the history of algebraic logic, more specifically. The book provided the first-ever full-length exposition of Boole’s work, which had then appeared more than a quarter century before, propelling post-Boolean innovations. What really set the book apart, however, was that, with Boole’s system on the table, Venn worked out its relation to all previous attempts at a symbolic or quasi-algebraic treatment of logic and also to all who had tried to improve it over the course of the 1850s to 1880s. It would not go too far to say that Symbolic Logic brought the tradition of algebraic logic into existence. Boole himself had become aware of the anticipations by Leibniz about a year after the publication of Laws of Thought, when the Cambridge polymath Robert Leslie Ellis pointed them out to him. Venn was the first to investigate the writings of almost one hundred logicians—notably Segner, Ploucquet, von Holland, Lambert, and other eighteenth-century followers of Leibniz—whose names were completely unknown in England. This was more than a bibliographic feature. It not only showed that Boole’s work was not as revolutionary as sometimes thought but, thereby, also made his system part of a long lineage. The aspect of tradition making also permeated Venn’s discussion of the improvements and modifications of Boole’s system put forward by, among others, Jevons, Macfarlane, MacColl, and Schröder. For what it did was to move the discussion from foundations to symbolism and method. It strategically reduced issues that were potentially of foundational significance to technicalities to be judged solely on the basis of their usefulness. For example, MacColl’s main point that Boole’s equations should be replaced for connectives was presented as a question of notation only.

Historical Development

When Venn commenced his study of algebraic logic in the late 1870s, many of the books on the subject were unavailable in Britain’s “great libraries” and could be obtained only “by purchase from abroad.”75 The statement is remarkable, first and foremost, because it shows the wide range of books that Venn gathered under the same category: Leibniz’s Opera Philosophica, Ploucquet’s Fundamenta Philosophiae Speculativae, Boole’s The Mathematical Analysis of Logic, and Frege’s Begriffschrift. The situation caused Venn to become a collector of books. Some of his colleagues at the time were buying books that were of immediate scholarly relevance—Charles L. Dodgson, alias Lewis Carroll, is a case in point—or limited themselves for financial reasons to the few books that they already possessed—such as MacColl. Venn, however, could afford to aim for nothing less than finding “any work of logic that was ever known to exist.”76 After several years of painstaking searching—buying while traveling, engaging the services of booksellers, and invoking the assistance of other scholars like John Veitch in St. Andrews and Alexander Bain in Aberdeen—Venn established one of the largest private collections of logical books ever brought together. It contains some eleven hundred rare and antiquarian volumes from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century.77 Venn was not alone in his endeavor. Jevons, again, was his main competitor. Together with Robert Adamson, professor of logic at Owens College, he was apparently compiling an exhaustive bibliography of logical works. In this case, however, Jevons admitted that Venn outcompeted him, writing in a letter of 11 May 1880: “I was surprised to find how many books you cite which I have never heard of or at least not been able to see.”78

As said, Venn’s collection had more than a bibliographical function, as it also played an argumentative role in the creation of a logical tradition climaxed by Boole. Venn could make ad antiquitatem arguments against those who claimed originality for their systems and point to anticipations of parts of Boole’s work by logicians from the Leibniz-Wolff school. For example, following Ellis’s suggestion about a parallel to Boole’s index law found in Leibniz, Venn dismissed Jevons’s claim that “the late Professor Boole is the only logician in modern times who has drawn attention to this remarkable property of logical terms,” giving two “perfectly explicit anticipations.”79 Of the numerous attempts by post-Leibnizian (or pre-Kantian) logicians to provide symbolic or quasi-algebraic treatments of logic, Venn particularly valued that of the Swiss polymath the “unvergleichliche Mann” Johann Heinrich Lambert: “if [Boole] had knowingly built upon the foundation laid by his predecessor [Lambert], instead of beginning anew for himself, it would be hard to say which of the two had actually done the most.”80 The underlying point was twofold. On the one hand, Venn lamented the lack of progress in symbolic logic between Lambert and Boole, expressing an “uneasy suspicion” that it was due to the “disastrous effect” of Kant’s wish to preserve logic from mathematical treatment.81 On the other hand, it was not lost on Venn that Lambert himself placed his work on logic in the Aristotelian tradition. Lambert’s major treatise was tellingly entitled Neues Organon (1764), which emphasized the relation of its symbolic systematization of the syllogism to Aristotle’s Organon.

Most of the historical information in Symbolic Logic was scattered throughout the chapters, but the book ended with “Historic Notes.” Here, Venn gave a table showing and classifying some twenty-five different ways in which logicians from the time of Leibniz had attempted to represent symbolically the universal negative proposition (“No S is P”). “This single page,” wrote Jevons, “[opened] up the subject of logical symbolism and logical method in its full extension, thus hastening the time when some decision can be arrived at.82 Venn left no doubt that in the context of both symbolism and method, history should not be studied merely for its own sake but as a source for consensus:

Few things can be more perplexing to students of any subject than to find one author after another making use of a new notation to express old results. . . . At the time of writing my “Symbolic Logic” I had between twenty and thirty such schemes before me. Some of these, of course, express really distinct conceptions, or effect improvements in procedure, but most of them do not; we find half-a-dozen different signs standing for the same meaning, and half-a-dozen different meanings assigned to the same sign. I cannot but think that much of this confusion would be avoided if the various authors would take the trouble to inquire what had been already written upon their subject.83

9.5 Venn’s table of symbolical expressions of “No S is P.” From Symbolic Logic (1894), 481.

Drawing on his 1880 paper in the Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, “On the Various Notations Adopted for Expressing the Common Propositions Of Logic,” in the first edition of Symbolic Logic Venn categorized the twenty-five notations for “No S is P” into six groups: existential, identity, implication, common form, notional, and arbitrary. The second edition of 1894 gave thirty-tree notations and some seven groups: existential, identity, subsumption, mutual exclusion, implication, predicational, and notional (see figure 9.5). The four groups that appeared in both editions were existential, identity, implication, and notional: the first either denies the existence of the class of things that are both S and P or affirms not-S and not-P; the second makes the terms of the proposition respectively S and not-P and then identifies S with an undetermined part of not-P; the third regards the proposition as expressing a consequence, “If S then not-P”; and the fourth regards S and P as being representative of attributes. Much was added and changed in the second edition of Symbolic Logic, owing mainly to Venn’s rereading of old works and study of new ones. The following two features are perhaps most remarkable about the 1894 table. First, Venn now calls the affirmative existential plan of Peirce’s pupil O. H. Mitchell “one of the most ingenious and original modifications of the general Boolian method yet proposed.”84 He also makes note of Christine Ladd-Franklin, another pupil of Peirce’s, who introduced a notation founded on the exclusion, either of one class from another or of one or more classes from the universe of discourse. She interprets “No S is P” as “S is excluded from P,” and the form “There is S” is written as S ∨ ∞ (“S is part of the universe”). Venn remains committed to the negative existential plan originally proposed by Boole. But he now acknowledges that other notational plans, especially those of Mitchel and Ladd-Franklin, are very helpful in the solution of “extremely complicated problems” in algebraic logic.85 Second, in the first edition Venn threw MacColl, Peirce, Grassmann, and Frege together in the implication group because each of them adopted the implication view “If S then not-P.” The second edition places Peirce and Grassmann, along with Schröder, into the closely related group of logicians who adopt a subsumption view (“S is some part of not-P”). This change implied that Peirce, among others, was freed from the charge, leveled at Frege, of stepping “from the objective rendering of Logic towards the subjective”; for whereas subsumption regards the actual class relation, implication “introduces the attitude of the mind towards that relation in the way of an inference to be drawn.”86 What Venn calls the subsumption view substitutes inclusion (or predication) for equivalence (or identity) as the primary copula (primitive) of logical statements. Venn observes that this seems at present to be the more prevalent symbolic expression. But he himself would always hold on to the equation as the keystone of logic.

The Future of Algebraic Logic

It was not entirely true, as Jevons suggested in 1881, that Boole’s books had been much more talked about than read. During the 1860s and 1870s, figures ranging from Arthur Cayley, Bruce Halsted, and I. P. Hughlings to MacColl, Macfarlane, Peirce, Schröder, and Jevons himself had all commented on Boole. Venn nonetheless felt confident to write in Symbolic Logic that Boole’s books had yet to be “appreciated and utilized as they deserve.”87 Similarly, in his entry on Boole for the Dictionary of National Biography of 1886 Venn opined that the Boolean reform of logic had “only recently come to be properly appreciated and to exercise its full influence on the course of logical speculation.”88

The first edition of Symbolic Logic had been devoted mainly to the explanation and justification of Boole’s work. The major changes in the 1894 edition consisted partly in shortening of explanation and partly in a fuller discussion of specific topics, such as particular propositions and the intensional and propositional interpretation of classes. It was this edition that brought algebraic logic up to date by including modifications by Peirce, Schröder, and others and that defended it, no longer against those maintaining the older point of view, but against the alternative logics of De Morgan, Jevons, MacColl, and Frege. All this did not result in a fundamental change of position on Venn’s part. He always believed that there was “only one thing before the world” that could be called a logical system and that this was the system due to Boole.89 Rather than entirely discouraging others from improving Boole’s work, Venn was highly suspicious of anyone who believed his or her results to be “more original than they really are.”90 Venn himself did come to adopt the inclusive reading of disjunction, which he persistently and tellingly called the unexclusive notation, and make use of other innovations, such as the affirmative existential scheme of expressing propositions. But he argued that these were merely questions of method rather than of principle. Indeed, in his 1898 Treatise on Universal Algebra, the Cambridge mathematician Alfred North Whitehead observed that it had always been Venn’s ambition to perfect Boole’s system “with the slightest possible change.”91

The first edition of Symbolic Logic referred some eight times to Peirce and Schröder, often in footnotes and mainly by way of comparison. The second edition contained some sixteen references to Peirce and more than thirty to Schröder, to which Venn added a small number of references to his colleagues J. N. Keynes and W. E. Johnson. It is not surprising that Venn mentioned Schröder’s Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik (1890–1905), Peirce’s edited volume Studies in Logic (1883), J. Neville Keynes’s Studies and Exercises in Formal Logic (1884), which Venn had proofread, and W. E. Johnson’s “The Logical Calculus” (1892) as the most important recent publications. Schröder, Peirce, and W. E. Johnson were all post-Boolian logicians of some sort, making modifications to Boole’s system largely from within that tradition. Keynes stood on a different footing, as he was a postsyllogistic logician critical of algebraic logic. But Venn valued Keynes’s Formal Logic, of which he wrote a positive review in 1884, because it showed that the most complex problems in logic could be solved “with much less symbolic apparatus than had previously been supposed.”92 Venn took seriously the alternative views on the symbolic expression and notation of propositions introduced by these logicians. But whereas Venn remained committed to an equational logic of classes, Peirce and Schröder slowly moved toward a position that was in some respects more similar to mathematical logic, as developed in the work of Frege and in Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica, than to algebraic logic. Peirce, for one, modified Boole’s system in various ways, maintaining its algebraic form, but distinguishing what is purely logical from what is interpretable only in mathematical terms. Like Jevons before him, Peirce felt that it was a mistake to push the analogy with mathematics too far; to analyze inferences and show on what their validity depends, rather than only solving problems and finding the conclusions to be drawn from given premises, it was necessary to weaken the tie with mathematics. Unlike Venn, Peirce rejected Boole’s exclusive addition and logically uninterpretable operations, among other things. Peirce then set out to show that an improved version of De Morgan’s logic of relations, ridiculed by Venn, could be formulated within his new logical calculus. He thus brought together into one system, for the first time, De Morgan’s and Boole’s logics. Peirce’s modifications were immediately recognized by Schröder, for whom they played a key part in his formulation of what would come to be called “the Boole-Schröder algebra of logic,” as set out in his Vorlesungen. These post-Boolean developments went beyond Venn’s Boolean frame of mind. At a more specific level, however, Venn did incorporate part of his fellow algebraic logicians’ notation into his 1894 work. He agreed with W. E. Johnson that “>” should replace “v” and followed Peirce and Schröder in placing a bar over a term to indicate negation, extending it to the copula in the case of categorical propositions.93 (Thus, for example, rather than writing xy = v for “Some X is Y,” Venn, wrote xy > 0 or x ≠ y, i.e., “There is X that is not Y” or “There is Y that is not-X.”) Another sign of the changed status of algebraic logic in Britain noticeable in the 1894 edition of Symbolic Logic was Venn’s reference to problems and solutions contributed to the Educational Times and Nature—both remarkable sources in the history of logic—and to questions formulated for the Moral Sciences Tripos examinations.94 It was in this context that Venn referred approvingly to the methods that W. E. Johnson, J. N. Keynes, and, especially, Schröder used for the solution of problems. These problems were more complex than those discussed by Boole, and the proposed way of arriving at a solution differed from and improved on Venn’s own. Among the examples that Venn particularly liked were that of elimination with six terms involving particular propositions and that of starting from some conclusion and having to find the propositions from which it was derived.

The author to which Venn referred most in both editions of Symbolic Logic was Jevons, who is cast as his main antagonist when it comes to foundations. Jevons was an algebraic logician too, but also the very first to object to fundamental assumptions and principles underlying Boole’s system. It is possible to read Symbolic Logic as a lengthy attempt to defend Boole against Jevons, who according to Venn had thrown away nearly everything that was characteristic and attractive about the Laws of Thought.95 One major admission to Jevons in the second edition was Venn’s adoption of Jevons’s nonexclusive interpretation of disjunction. However, as said, Venn emphasized that he only did so for practical rather than fundamental reasons. Venn also heavily criticized Jevons’s alternative system, which, contrary to Venn, Peirce, and Schröder, was oriented around an intensional interpretation of symbols, where x, y, z, stand for attributes. Following Schröder, who in his review of Frege’s Begriffschrift admitted that “there certainly is a one-sidedness in completely disregarding the “content” [i.e., intension, or sense] of the concept,” Venn turned his earlier ten-page discussion of the “intensive scheme” into a separate chapter in the 1894 edition.96 Venn’s main point was that this scheme—which, though “practically abandoned,” was still “verbally espoused from time to time”—could be made to do almost everything that the extensional scheme could do, but in a manner more awkward and less direct.97

Another author to whom Venn referred relatively often, if primarily in footnotes, was De Morgan, who had died in 1871. Venn had surprisingly little to say about the logic of relations (which he called logic of relatives), initiated by De Morgan, established by Peirce and Schröder, and advanced by Whitehead and Russell. This is surprising, especially, because the study of relations showed that traditional syllogistic logic, which Venn praised for its proximity to common language, is actually inadequate to express and justify very simple arguments occurring in everyday life (e.g., “X is taller than Y”). The first edition of Symbolic Logic dismisses as “hopeless” the entire project of trying to take account of “relations generally, instead of those merely which are indicated by the ordinary copula ‘is.’”98 Venn believed that it would not add anything to any logical system and that its study is at any rate too mathematical. The second edition barely makes any mention of the logic of relations.

MacColl and Frege were among those logicians who had explicitly “spoken of ‘their systems’ and contrasted them with that of Boole.”99 Frege’s main criticism of Boole was that it is a mistake to treat the logic of classes as more basic than the logic of propositions, that of MacColl that propositional connectives, of which the main one is the conditional, rather than Boole’s equations should be primary. Venn criticized them for essentially replicating Boole’s work, but in a less satisfactory form and only partially. Indeed, both were said to be working “in apparent ignorance that anything better of the kind had ever been attempted before” and for regarding their results as “as more original than they really are.”100 (This criticism was later repeated almost verbatim by Schröder.) Venn and MacColl studied each other’s work and corresponded with each other, not only privately, but also publicly, in letters to the editor of Nature.101 Much to MacColl’s annoyance, neither Venn nor Jevons was able or willing to recognize the “anti-” or “post-Boolian” features of his papers, let alone that these represented a step forward.102 MacColl himself found the cause in Venn’s (humorously intended) “attitude of slight social repression” against logical innovations:

Mr. Venn professes great admiration for the late Prof. Boole’s genius, and I heartily agree with him, though we admire on somewhat different grounds. I ground my admiration on the fact that Boole worked wonders with an unnecessarily complicated and otherwise defective symbolical method of his own invention. Mr. Venn apparently grounds his admiration on the . . . supposition that Boole’s method is really very simple and very effective, but that its author did not understand very clearly the real principles of its construction, and did not by any means apply it with as much ease and dexterity as he might have done.103

Venn confessed to Jevons that MacColl’s craving for recognition “greatly bothered” him.104 Perhaps as a consequence of this, the second edition of Symbolic Logic contained even fewer references to his work.105

Frege’s Begriffschrift, often hailed as one of the most important works ever written in logic, met with a very poor reception when it appeared in 1879. Owing, not in the least part, to the logical notation introduced, many contemporaries failed to appreciate Frege’s innovations. Venn’s negative review of the Begriffschrift must have been disappointing to Frege, since compared to the five other reviewers—four German and one French—Venn was the most prominent logician. It was Schröder’s highly critical review, however, that most troubled Frege, as it was the longest and most detailed and appeared in the prestigious Zeitschrift für Mathematik und Physik. (Frege wrote a long response, but it was rejected by four of the leading German journals of the time.) Venn’s review, which appeared in Mind in April 1880, was not even one page long.106 Neither Venn nor Schröder recognized anything new or original in Frege. Both accused him of replicating Boole’s work, while omitting a comparison of his Begriffschrift with Boole’s algebraic logic and Aristotelian syllogistic logic. “Here again we have an instance of an ingenious man,” Venn wrote in the second edition of Symbolic Logic, “working out a scheme . . . in apparent ignorance that anything better of the kind had ever been attempted before.107 Venn also made the (ironically prescient) remark that Frege’s Begriffschrift contained “no reference to any symbolic predecessor except a vague mention of Leibnitz.”108 The 1880 review was condescending even in the first sentence, where Venn wrote that “Dr. Frege’s work seems to be a somewhat novel kind of Symbolic Logic, dealing much more in diagrammatic and geometric forms than Boole’s.”109 Venn admits that any symbolic logical system will “appear cumbrous and inconvenient to those who have been accustomed to make use of some different system,” but even when making allowance for this fact, he argues, “it does not seem to me that Dr. Frege’s scheme can for a moment compare with that of Boole.”110

Venn never recognized that there were limits to the application of mathematics to logic, nor that logic could be expected to be anything else than a calculus ratiocinator that generalized an essentially Aristotelian subject matter. Boole’s system was the study of algebraic relations between propositions, where the proposition itself remains largely unanalyzed. The algebraic tradition of logic canonized in Symbolic Logic, and crowned in Schröder’s Vorlesungen, would remain of importance for the development of modern logic, however. It found an application in the early twentieth-century work of Thoralf Skolem and Alfred Tarski.111 At Cambridge, Venn put algebraic logic on the map as early as in 1874. The topic would be taught first by himself and later by his former pupil W. E. Johnson in the advanced logic course for moral sciences students, including Russell in 1894. Since Frege’s Begriffschrift was available only in German, it would not have appeared on the Moral Sciences Tripos reading list anyway. But it is nonetheless interesting to speculate on the possible influence of Venn’s rejection of Frege on the communis opinio at Cambridge. W. E. Johnson, who referred to Frege very sparingly and who would be unsympathetic to Russell’s innovations, largely remained within the algebraic tradition. Russell—whose reading list for the moral sciences included both Boole’s Laws of Thought and Venn’s Symbolic Logic—did not read Frege properly until 1902.112 The very first in Britain to recognize the importance of Frege’s work, he used almost the exact same wording as Venn’s to dismiss the Begriffschrift symbolism in his 1903 Principles of Mathematics. Symbolic Logic remained a standard textbook until as late as the 1920s in Britain and America. When the young Quine chose to major in mathematics with honors in mathematical logic, Venn’s work was among the books that the eminent American philosopher and logician was advised to study.

10

Dereverend Believer and Amateur Scientist

(1883–90)

The 1880s were marked by several turning points in Venn’s life: dramatic changes in his clerical, family, and professional identities. Venn continued to build a solid reputation for teaching and examining in the Moral Sciences Tripos at Cambridge and for scholarship, publishing Symbolic Logic (1881) and The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic (1889). He received academic recognition through election as a fellow of the Royal Society, followed by the award of the degree of doctor of science at Cambridge. Although he would continue to look for preferment in the field of logic, Venn donated his large private collection of logical books to the Cambridge University Library and decided to turn to much less abstract pursuits, drawing on his increasingly quantitative approach to probability to do anthropometric, statistical, and historical research. Meanwhile, in 1883 Venn had taken advantage of the Clerical Disabilities Act to resign Holy Orders, and he and Susanna celebrated the birth of their son, John Archibald.

A Dereverend Believer

Resignation of Holy Orders

Venn wrote his autobiographical Annals with encouragement from his wife, Susanna, during his recovery from pneumonia in 1886–87. What he variously called his apologia pro vita sua or confessio was never published, but Venn circulated the text—which he would revise in 1902 and have corrected in 1917—among family members: Susanna, his brother, Henry, and his second-cousin Albert Venn Dicey.1 Annals covered the period between 1834, the year of his birth, and 1866, when The Logic of Chance was published and Venn was teaching in the Moral Sciences Tripos and put himself forward for the Knightbridge Professorship—all signs of a mature, independent identity. It was written as an attempt to provide a post hoc analysis of the logic, so to speak—the “shaking down” process whereby old opinions lose their hold and new opinions find their place—which eventually led him to abandon Evangelicalism. What resulted was not a sudden crisis but a long period in which Venn found himself in an “unstable equilibrium,” conscientiously holding contradictory doctrines and becoming aware of a divergence between his public and private positions.2 The circumstances immediately leading to Venn’s decision, some ten years after Sidgwick’s, to resign Holy Orders are not entirely clear: Annals stops in 1866, and the evidence for his religious position between the time of his father’s death in 1873 and his resignation of Holy Orders under the Clerical Disabilities Act in 1883 is very sparse. Henry Venn had died at Mortlake on 13 January 1873, having received final communion a few days earlier from his oldest son. Around that time, with tributes to the “grand epic poem of true Christian heroism” that was Henry Venn’s life pouring in from different parts of the world, Venn’s family had become greatly concerned about Venn’s spiritual welfare at Cambridge.3 Clayton, the staunch Evangelical and former tutor of Caius, informed John Venn of Hereford in 1875 that his nephew had been seen in public connection with both Sidgwick and Herbert Spencer, names that stood for agnosticism and materialism.4 Susanna and Albert Venn Dicey at one point tried, without success, to encourage Venn to extend the incomplete narrative of Annals.5 “Susie says the same as you do,” Venn would write to Dicey in 1919, “viz. that I ought to continue it to a later date. . . . I may perhaps do it some day, but I have lost the taste for it, as the past recedes further back.”6 Venn by that time not only had lost interest in the events but apparently also felt that Annals already said enough “in the way of an apologia to explain my position, & why I resigned orders.”7 That statement is surprising since Venn admitted, in Annals and elsewhere, that he himself never completely understood the mental state that prevented him from following the demands of honesty. It is interesting to observe that honesty was, indeed, both “a key theme and a key point of tension” in Annals.8 On the one hand, religious sincerity, honesty, and self-examination of one’s beliefs were significant Evangelical and Venn family values. On the other hand, within Venn’s self-acquired network of friends, sincerity and honesty of profession made an argument for leaving the church, if full and sincere subscription to its doctrines could not be given. Venn, however, maintained a clerical position while upholding beliefs that for many years were pulling him in the opposing direction. This lapse of time between doubt and action was not uncommon. Among members of Venn’s own generation, his cousins Fitzjames and Leslie Stephen experienced a similar struggle to balance the demands of their conscience. Despite many “ingenious subterfuges,” Fitzjames Stephen was so “thoroughly imbued with the old spirit that he could not go over completely to its antagonists”: “to destroy the old faith,” wrote his brother and biographer Leslie Stephen, “was still for him to destroy the great impulse to a noble life.”9 Leslie Stephen himself had resigned his fellowship at Trinity Hall in 1862 after he found himself unable to conduct religious services in the College Chapel. But he did not renounce Holy Orders until after the death of his mother, Jane Catherine Stephen (née Venn), in 1875. The Stephen’s family involvement with Evangelicalism had primarily been as laymen, Leslie Stephen being the exception in seeking a clerical rather than a legal career. Unlike the Stephen brothers, Venn carried the weight of a family tradition of nine generations of university graduate clergymen and three generations of Evangelicals, including his awe-inspiring father, who he believed to be of a “superior order” and “higher moral stamp.”10 The rejection of the religious ideas his father represented went hand in hand with a sense of failure and unworthiness. It was a dilemma for several mid-Victorian Cambridge clergymen, perhaps especially for those who, like Venn, came from an Evangelical background where the connection between family and religion was particularly strong: that of being unable to believe what they had always believed but feeling untrue to their innermost feelings if they abandoned belief. No surprise that many of them would embark on a lifelong search for the viability of (non-Christian) religious belief, turning to naturalistic or pragmatic arguments, or both. This points to a crucial aspect of Venn’s change of religious position: in addition to the gradual rise of his own independent identity, there was the redefinition of the basis on which he founded his beliefs, from an emotional attachment to intellectual considerations combined with practical habits.

The departure from the religion of the previous three generations of Venns was far from inevitable, as was evident from the lives of Venn’s siblings. About Henrietta, Venn wrote that she “took the impress so entirely (that my father unconsciously rather than deliberately put on her) that to the end of her life the opinions she had early imbibed fitted her like a skin.”11 Henrietta supported her brother when he resigned orders, though he knew that the move must also have pained her. Venn strongly felt that her “naturally bright, sensible & liberal mind” was too much restricted by her adherence to doctrines that he himself came to regard as narrow.12 Henry, having followed his older brother to Gonville and Caius College (in 1857) and then taken Holy Orders (in 1867), assisted their father with his work for the CMS (1861–67) before choosing a parochial life, taking parishes in Devon and Kent. Many years later, in 1900, Henry Venn would be collated by Archbishop Temple to an honorary canonry of Canterbury, where he lived until his death in 1923. Both through his own career and through that of one of his sons, Arthur Dennis Venn—ordained deacon in 1906 and priest in 1909—Henry Venn continued the Venns’ clerical dynasty, which his more prominent brother replaced for an academic one.13 Henry Venn’s career put into practice a possibility about which Venn privately speculated in Annals: what would have happened if he himself had been brought under the influence of a moderate or Broad Church vicar who, unlike Manley at Mortlake or Marsh at St. Leonard’s, commanded respect and diverted his attention away from philosophy and theology and toward active parochial work.14

The narrative of Annals is also one of the gradual development of a less distinct doctrinal religious position. Already during the 1860s, Venn privately identified himself as a Broad Churchman rather than an Evangelical. This did not place him beyond the pale of the church, but as the example of Maurice, among others, shows, it was controversial. Unlike Sidgwick and Leslie Stephen, in the early 1870s Venn did not find a contradiction between a Broad Church position and a liberal view of subscription to religious dogmas. Neither did he think the Broad Church itself to be intellectually dishonest. At some point in the early 1880s, however, Venn may have begun to realize that it was impossible to find permanent refuge in a Broad Church position, seeking to accommodate historical and scientific evidence within the narrow bounds of the Thirty-Nine Articles rather than following through his view to a more truthful conclusion. The fact is that Venn eventually felt unable to offer in conscience even a relaxed form of subscription. “Many people in like case simply put on a black tie, & lie low; but I did not think this quite straightforward,” Venn would write in 1903.15 When in 1883 Venn finally took advantage of the Clerical Disabilities Act to relinquish Holy Orders, rejoining the ranks of the laity, he sent his brother “about 3 lines announcing [his] purpose & then, ‘This is not for discussion.’”16 They would not speak about it for almost thirty years.

Venn left orders but never became agnostic: rather he moved, with Seeley, Sidgwick, and others, into an undogmatic Christianity. His was, after all, the anima naturaliter Christiana. “8 generations of one profession imply a good deal of [natural] selection,” Venn wrote, putting the blame for his “obstinate disposition to step up unto the pulpit” on William Venn, who became vicar of Otterton in 1599.17 Throughout his long life, Venn would continue to attend church and College Chapel services, retain strong sympathies with the country clergy, and share with others from his generation of Clapham descendants a reverence for family saints. “I do not claim to be ‘reverend’—though not, I hope ‘irreverend.’” “‘Dereverend’ my Church friends call me.”18 By the early 1880s, Venn could no longer honestly subscribe to the official articles of Anglican faith. However, looking back, Venn would observe that if the church had moved sooner in the direction of undogmatic Christianity, he need never have given up orders. The openness with which some of the “church dignitaries” adopted positions that in the 1860s and 1870s would have provoked public outcry would prompt Venn to write to Dicey in 1919: “I suppose, if I had waited till present times, I might have felt that I was just as much entitled to stay where I was.”19 However, by that time, when the only thing he longed for was to take up a country parish, Venn realized there was no way back: “there is a shut gate with 39 iron spikes on it, which bars the way.”20

Cambridge Context

Venn’s decision to resign Holy Orders was smoothed by the changing Cambridge context at university, college, and domestic level. With the Universities Test Act (1871) and the Oxford and Cambridge Act (1877), removing religious tests for any office or teaching position other than in divinity, Venn was not obliged to give up his fellowship when he made use of the Clerical Disabilities Act. At Caius, dogmatic Evangelicalism had ceased to prosper after the departure of Charles Clayton, who would be remembered for his disapproval of clergymen who danced and his opposition to the abolition of religious tests.21 Few were able to say what the exact religious complexion was that came in its place around the time that Norman Ferrers was master and E. S. Roberts tutor. But the tendency in college was decidedly toward an “unostentatious” religion, and the environment one in which “men did not have to search their consciences so long as they were prepared to go sometimes to chapel.”22 As to chapel, Caius, like other colleges did in the wake of the Universities Test Act, was fighting a “rearguard action” to continue to impose “obligatory or disciplinary attendance” on a community that now also included non-Anglicans.23 When a paper was circulated on the issue among the resident members of the Governing Body, Venn accepted that compulsory chapel should not be abolished, “not so much from decided opinion as from total inability to suggest any other course.”24 It remained so in principle, though with declining effect, for undergraduates until the First World War.

It had become possible in 1879–80 for those who had “given proofs of distinction by some original contribution to the advancement of Science” to proceed to the degree of doctor of science.25 Venn was permitted to carry the title of ScD early in 1884, the record of the award being signed by his friend Ferrers, master of Caius and vice-chancellor of the university.26 His scholarly credentials were clear. Following The Logic of Chance, by the 1870s and 1880s he was publishing regularly in specialized journals alongside Spencer, Jevons, Bain, Sidgwick, and James Sully, by whom he was praised, especially, for his acuteness and comprehensiveness. Much like the establishment of professional journals like Mind, the award of doctor of science was yet another sign of increasing specialization, with academics seeking career recognition and status. For Venn, it was also a very practical solution to a serious and weighty topic. “I knew it would be a relief to my sister, brother & uncle (I waited till long after my father’s death) to feel that they could just write ‘Dr. Venn’ & have done with it.”27

There was also the advent of a new generation of the Venn family, with the birth on 10 November 1883 of John and Susanna Venn’s son, John Archibald (“Archie”). It was a milestone that seems to have made Venn aware that his choice for a university career might well change the future course of the male line through the inheritance of acquired characteristics, a topic that greatly interested him. Tellingly, John Archibald Venn would indeed pursue an academic career, and when he married, his chosen partner was not the daughter of a clergyman but of another Caius fellow. The Venns had moved from Brookside to Petersfield-house in 1871, and subsequently from 3 St. Peter’s Terrace in 1878 to 4 St. Peter’s Terrace in 1879, where they would live on and off until 1900. Not unlike Henry and Martha Venn before them, though less strongly so, John and Susanna Venn shared a sense of private religion. Their religious experience at home was shaped partly by undogmatic belief and partly by frequent poor physical and mental health. Both had rejected the Evangelicalism of their youth and actively sought to fulfill their spiritual need. What separated them was the way in which they tended to approach this search. Susanna Venn’s commonplace book was largely mystical in content. In a letter to her husband she would write of her experience of a deep inner conflict:

an occasionally absolutely triumphant strain of inner faith, of mystic realisation, illumination, knowledge (of no creed, no church, no sect) even of no people and no language; but yet always in conflict, gaining, losing strong, being hidden and worsted; being gloriously victorious then again buried as in the depths of a despair which admits neither of the thought of God nor man as any alleviation—only the life love you have given me for so many years survives—and the mother’s passion for the child.28

Susanna Venn’s religiosity was more emotionally charged than that of her husband, but it also involved a level of intellectual inquiry. For example, through her acquaintance with a Cambridge scholar of Sanskrit, probably either Edward Byles Cowell or Cecil Bendall, fellow of Caius College, she obtained and studied translations of works of Eastern religious philosophy.29 She was nonetheless aware of the sharp contrast between her own strongly emotional religious attitude and her husband’s measured and intellectual outlook. Susanna Venn at times wrote of her fear of being judged by his academic standards: “I am afraid of your calm wisdom and utter absolute rectitude. I dread your saying perhaps ‘She doesn’t even speak the truth’, when I say all my worn brain can comprehend or recollect of ‘Truth.’”30 She did defend her mysticism and lack of orthodoxy against her husband: “I wasn’t born so, any more than you were, & I can no more go back than you can.”31 Perhaps even more than her husband, Susanna Venn was acutely aware that the steps in a journey away from religious orthodoxy “could not be retraced nor could the old certainties, however comforting, be regained.”32 She also felt that, since such a journey is entirely individual, the standards of religious truth become subjective. This went one step too far for her churchgoing husband, who recognized the importance of solitude and quiet reflection but also valued the social aspects of religion, such as communal worship, and the aspect of learning from the lives and experiences of others.

Venn probably did have at least some understanding of his wife’s idiosyncratic religious position. Already in his Hulsean Lectures of 1869, he had acknowledged not merely that “suffering of various kinds is one of the buttresses of our faith” but also that suffering had a deep impact on someone’s perception of religious truth.33 It was a view supported, in this particular context, by Dicey, who wrote to Venn that “no ‘evidences’ ever in themselves inspired Xtian faith. It is . . . a kind of enthusiasm generated by . . . feelings,” of which those generated by pain and suffering were the strongest.34 Many years later, Venn would comment on his former pupil Frederic W. Maitland’s biography of Leslie Stephen by writing that “a man who enjoys the legs & lungs that can carry him, till almost old age, to the tops of the highest Alps; & also the money & the leisure to do it almost every year, is not a fair sample of the stock for whom religions have to be fitted.”35 Another key theme in Susanna Venn’s commonplace book was, indeed, that of physical and mental pain.36 From the start of their marriage in 1867, her ill health had periodically drawn Venn away from Cambridge—Sidgwick lecturing for him on logic in 1870—or resulted in physical separation for the couple.37 For some time, they were in the “full swing of it” in Cambridge, but in the 1880s and 1890s the family would be “kicked about, by health conditions, like a football.”38 With young “Archie” requiring much care and “Susie being always on the verge of breaking down,” the Venns were first driven to Bournemouth and, after a short try there, to Eastbourne.39 During the 1890s, Susanna Venn would be in particularly poor health, especially following the death of her father in 1897; several years later, she would be unable to attend her own son’s wedding because of faintness and sickness.40 Until the end of her life, she was intermittently bedridden and often placed under the care of a nurse. Aelfrida Tillyard, the medium and self-styled mystic, would later report that one of the physical causes of Susanna Venn’s suffering had been recurring problems during pregnancies. “She had born him as many children as Queen Anne, and of these, only one had survived.”41 At least part of Susanna Venn’s hardship was psychological in nature, something that she herself attributed to a form of melancholia inherited from her father. During one episode in June 1900 in London, where Venn fell seriously ill with pneumonia and pleurisy and was “lying in a most critical state for many days,” as the Caian reported, nurses reportedly had to restrain her from throwing herself from the window of the Great Central Hotel.42

Venn’s parents, Henry and Martha Venn, had in the 1830s and 1840s made their household a place of Evangelical worship. John and Susanna Venn, in contrast, found the spiritual aspect of their marriage in the search for the comfort of new certainties. Following the interest in psychical phenomena in vogue in Cambridge and London in the 1880s and 1890s, the couple became involved in the Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882 with Sidgwick as its first president.43 For Susanna Venn, the appeal of research into telepathy, hypnotism, apparitions, and séances seems to have been mystical and emotional, the need for a sense of purpose. Others, like W. H. Meyers, Francis Galton, and William James, were also scientifically and philosophically curious. To men like Sidgwick, and perhaps for Venn too, psychical research was ultimately a religious pursuit: a collaborative attempt to naturalize the spiritual, simultaneously trumping both the scientific materialists and the spiritualists and proving the reality of what they themselves wanted to believe in despite the scientific issues that had contributed to their religious doubts. Around the end of the 1880s, the council and honorary members of the society included Gladstone, Balfour, Tennyson, Ruskin, Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), two bishops, and nine fellows of the Royal Society, one of whom was Venn.44 A decade later, by which time Sidgwick had already become doubtful of the whole enterprise, Venn would describe himself as a rather skeptical member. But Venn was still willing to defend his Evangelical forebears’ vision of meeting again in heaven, explicitly admitting the pragmatic, this-worldly benefits of belief in an afterlife: “It seems to me a very rational view. The only condition on which a future life can be considered probable, to my thinking, is that it should be a continuation of this.”45 Like Venn, Sidgwick was unable to accept heaven and hell as the basis of ethical behavior; instead he looked for evidence of survival after death, of human immortality, on which to ground a new system of ethics. Susanna Venn remained more personally committed than her husband. In 1895 she contributed to the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research a case of apparent clairvoyance involving her son and a letter from Denmark, to which she added a short report of an instance of dream transference between her and her son. Venn’s endorsement of the first event spoke for itself: “This was so.”46

Dr. Venn, FRS: Professional Logician, Amateur Scientist

As someone educated in pre-reform Cambridge, Venn supported and benefitted from reforms that opened up new opportunities for academic careers. The Universities Test Act (1871), the new degree of Doctor of Science (1879), and the Cambridge Statutes (1882) not only smoothed his choice to resign Holy Orders but also allowed him to teach, examine, study, and publish, not as a mere interlude before taking up another post, but as a profession with status and possibilities of preferment. Venn was not only one of the very first professional philosophers, but also a significant forefather of Cambridge analytic philosophy: he was a frequent contributor of articles on logic and scientific method to the journal Mind—of which he would become coeditor in 1891, under George Stout’s editorship—primarily responsible for the introduction of probability theory, inductive logic, and algebraic logic into the Moral Sciences Tripos and the teacher of the teachers of the philosophers who started the “analytical revolution” at Cambridge, G. E. Moore and Russell.47 Some twenty years after he had returned to Cambridge to take up the ancient post of catechist, Venn’s efforts twice earned him recognition: the award of the degree of doctor of science (ScD) in 1884 and, less than a year earlier, in June 1883, aged forty-nine, a fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS)—the very bastion of the scientific establishment in Britain (see figure 10.1).48

10.1 Portrait of Venn, aged around fifty, ca. 1883. By Henry Maull for Maull and Fox. Reproduced by permission of the Royal Society.

Venn was a professional philosopher in a more modern sense than, say, Sidgwick: logic, for Venn, was free from the passion and personal investment that marked Sidgwick’s contributions to ethics. Already in 1883, Venn only half-jokingly wrote to a close friend that “logic, as you know is a hobby of mine, but I frankly admit that no healthy mind unless carefully and artificially warped can take any interest in such a subject”: “Of downright palpable nonsense, I don’t think that it has contributed nearly as much as other subjects, e.g., Law & Theology; but it has done what it could to redress the balance in the way of masses of unspeakable dreariness in times past.”49 It was logic that had provided Venn with the opening needed to start his academic career; two books, a dozen papers, and a handful of reviews later, he was weary of the discipline. However disillusioned Venn had become with logic, since it was his foremost specialty it continued to be the field in which he sought preferment. The university reforms of the Second Royal Commission, launched in 1872, had created a new potential avenue for advancement for Venn as the new statutes made provision for the erection of a chair in mental philosophy and logic as soon as funds would allow.50 When in 1883 the General Board of Studies expressed its opinion that such a chair be created within no more than two years, the prospect was greeted by Venn with a mix of dry humor and weariness: “A professorship of Logic will be founded, for which if alive & not too decrepit I shall presumably stand. This represents the sole piece of preferment which I can conceive that the present dispensation of things on earth has in store for me:—I shall probably not get it when it does come.”51 The prospect of gaining a future chair in logic, combined with awareness of Sidgwick’s reputation, made Venn decide not to put in his name for the Knightbridge Professorship when it became vacant on Birks’s death in July 1883. Together with Todhunter, Leslie Stephen, Hort, and Seeley, Venn served as an elector and chose Sidgwick. Given the two-centuries-old link between the chair and membership of the Church of England, the election was a further milestone in the emergence of an increasingly secular academic culture at Cambridge.52

Following his severe illness in the winter of 1886–67, and long-term concerns over the poor health of his wife and son, Venn in 1887 announced his intention of giving up his lectureship. “At the urgent request of Moral Sciences teachers in the University and of the Master and Fellows [of Caius],” Venn instead proposed a reduction in moral sciences teaching, which, once supported by Caius and the University Board of Studies, allowed him to teach in one term only as moral sciences lecturer at Caius.53 The measure had both a personal and a professional basis. The creation of a separate Theology Tripos (1871) and History Tripos (1875) had considerably reduced the number of students reading for the Moral Sciences Tripos; and on top of that, these students were distributed between a larger number of intercollegiate university lecturers, which reduced the teaching load within Caius even further. The support for Venn’s proposal was a clear sign not only of the growth of teaching provision and professional collegiality across the university since his original appointment in 1862 but also of the rather precarious state of the moral sciences in the 1870 and 1880s. There were no more than two or three students expected each year in Caius and often around ten and five, respectively, for “Part I” and “Part II” in the entire university.54 With William Cunningham, Maitland, James Ward, Stout, and J. N. Keynes graduating in the first class of the tripos between 1870 and 1880, the moral sciences had clearly succeeded attracting able men.55 But as the records of the meetings of the Special Moral Sciences Board of this period point out, there was growing friction among the members themselves, especially on the relation between Part I and Part II.56 In 1889, it was made possible for students to receive a degree on Part I alone and, as a result, few chose to go on to Part II. Sidgwick and Marshall, among others, often crossed swords over the place of political economy in the tripos. Marshall successfully advocated to exempt political economy students in Part II from compulsory ethics and metaphysics, an idea strongly opposed by Sidgwick. During the 1890s the situation would change again, until in 1903 the Economics Tripos was established, which became a key vehicle for “Marshallianism” in economic thought. The arrival of the first generation of moral sciences graduates that would continue as its teachers also brought conflict over the quality and appeal of the various parts of the still rather loose arrangement of the tripos. J. N. Keynes, for example, commented in 1881: “They (the examiners, that is, Levin, Read, Venn, and Lyttleton), have let the standards drop in a way that is rather distressing. The papers were poor ones. A great deal of book work, and the Political Economy antiquated.”57 It was the generation of “home grown” moral sciences graduates that propelled the transition to a specialized, discipline-based structure at Cambridge. James Ward and Stout specialized in psychology; J. N. Keynes, university lecturer between 1884 and 1891, wrote on both logic and economics; Cunningham changed from philosophy and theology to economics, eventually becoming the Tooke Professor of Economy and Statistics at King’s College London. One major problem, however, was for these men to find posts in the new subjects. “As with most of our Moral Science men here, few as they are,” Venn wrote in 1888, “there is much difficulty in finding any reasonable, not to say lucrative, employment.”58 W. E. Johnson, the eleventh wrangler in 1882 with a background in logic and psychology, whom Venn always held in particularly high esteem, lectured for many years on the mathematical theory of economics.

By 1888–89, when he was finishing his third textbook, The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic, Venn donated his large collection of logic books to the Cambridge University Library. With his teaching limited to Easter term only, and the weariness of working in logic having set in, Venn even talked of finding a complete change of academic direction. He spent more and more time away from Cambridge, using his many nonlecturing days and holidays to explore new scientific pursuits, mostly as an “amateur.” It added another layer to Venn’s remarkable academic development, which demonstrates that the boundaries of professional status and disciplines were still very porous. Venn had never been trained as a moral scientist, let alone as a logician. Over the course of the 1860s and 1870s, he had turned himself into a self-educated, and self-styled professional. Now that he had grown tired of his profession, Venn followed some of his other interests. This suggests that, like the generation of academics that followed him, Venn was a professional, but, in contrast with that same generation, one that never fully specialized in a disciplinary sense.

Early in 1889, Venn sought the advice of Dicey, the Vinerian Professor of English Law at Oxford since 1865, on his prospects of election to the vacant Wykeham Professorship of Logic.59 Dicey informed Venn about the composition of the board of electors, the scope of the chair (it “certainly does not require that you shd lecture on Aristotle”), and the months of annual residence and alleviated Venn’s concerns about his suitability (“I cannot see any harm whatever that it wd do you to stand”).60 Given that Venn was apparently “not much known” in Oxford, Dicey had “no hope of success.”61 But because he favored his second cousin’s candidature on “private and public grounds” he did approach the electors informally on Venn’s behalf and urged him to make his case as strong as possible, adding: “please show this to your wife, as I think she is more likely to show energy about the matter than you are.”62 Susanna Venn, in fact, was the one who sent The Logic of Chance and Symbolic Logic to the electors and who drafted the application letter, which outlined her husband’s curriculum vitae and gave a list of references (“to whom however I have not suggested [my] application”) (see figure 10.2).63 Venn belonged as much to the academic elite as the men mentioned on the list: Bain, Robertson, Sidgwick, Sigwart, Galton, Leslie Stephen, Dicey, and Marshall. But unlike these colleagues and friends, at the age of fifty-four Venn was still not a professor.

10.2 Excerpt from Venn’s letter to the electors to the Wykeham Professorship of Logic, University of Oxford, 1889. CMS Venn, C41/4. Reproduced by permission of the Cadbury Research Library Special Collections, University of Birmingham, and the Church Mission Society.

Since one of the tasks for the Wykeham Chair of Logic was to connect logic with natural science, the application letter also gave a striking impression of Venn’s current interests besides logic and his preferred future direction of study: “I may add that I have given considerable attention to the subject of Psychophysics, having both some knowledge of, & considerable interest in, the requisite mechanical appliances. If elected, I should propose to give some instruction in this department, as it is connected at several points with the principles of Inductive Logic, but is apt to fall through in the curriculum between Philosophy & Physiology.”64 As Dicey wrote in a letter to Susanna Venn, dated 13 February 1889, in which he commented on the draft: “I am sorry to say I have not the least notion what is meant by Psychophysics. I hope the electors are less ignorant.”65 Although one of the front-runners, along with that of the Oxford philosopher Thomas Case, the application was unsuccessful, “psychophysics” notwithstanding. Another Oxford man was elected, John Cook Wilson, who was some fifteen years Venn’s junior.

What Dicey did not know was that Venn, alongside Sidgwick, James Ward, James McKeen Cattell, and Francis Galton, was involved in the birth of experimental psychology at Cambridge. Together with Ward, Venn actively campaigned for the establishment of a laboratory of psychophysics—the field, pioneered in Germany by among others Gustav Theodor Fechner and Wilhelm Wundt, that aimed at the establishment of quantitative laws concerning the interaction between physical stimuli and mental sensations. Venn also briefly collaborated with Galton in the Cambridge Anthropometric Laboratory, where the physical and mental features of hundreds of undergraduates were measured. The fact that these emerging fields came to fascinate Venn suggests a broader shift in his research interests, reflected perhaps most prominently in the 1876 and 1888 editions of The Logic of Chance, which devoted an increasing number of pages to a subject standing at the core of both psychophysics and anthropometry: the use of statistical methods to quantify uncertainty or, that is, to determine the accuracy of measurements in scientific experimentation and observation. It was synthesis, rather than originality of thought, and philosophical analysis, rather than technical innovation, that characterized Venn’s statistical work. But Venn nonetheless put his stamp on the discipline: he popularized statistics in his Logic of Chance, gave the first-ever lecture course in the theory of statistics in England, and, largely through his organizational activities, contributed to the introduction of statistical methods into the social and human sciences.

Statistics

Venn’s discussion of frequency probability in the first edition of The Logic of Chance had been almost entirely qualitative. Following the growing interest in statistics, the 1876 and especially the 1888 editions of the book made an attempt to analyze the central topic of the relation between an individual and the series or population to which it belongs in more quantitative terms. The central idea was still that of a series that combines individual irregularity and aggregate regularity, but Venn now sought to make this somewhat more precise. He did this by first focusing on the individual and then on the population, asking essentially two questions: What does it mean to say that an individual event is irregular or random? How should the series or populations be characterized and identified to provide reliable statistical information?

The third edition of The Logic of Chance contained a new chapter entitled “The Conception of Randomness and Its Scientific Treatment.” From the start, it is obvious that Venn firmly believed that all events in the world are causally determined, whether the cause is known or not. He held this to be true also of “random events,” since these too became uniform in the long run. Venn draws a basic distinction between the popular view of randomness, which looks to the process of events done “at random,” and the scientific view, which looks only to the outcomes. To illustrate the former case, Venn gave an example that leads to nonrandom distributions of results: that of a person standing in front of a bookcase and asked to select a book “at random,” in which case the books most easily reached are those most likely to be chosen. As an illustration of the second case, Venn described several examples, some real-life, some physical, and others mathematical. For all of them, the key idea is that a random distribution is a distribution that becomes uniform in the (admittedly fluctuating) limit: random series are series whose elements are equally likely. Put a piece of paper out on the ground during a rain shower. Where the individual drops fall is unpredictable, but it is certain that the paper will gradually be uniformly spotted over. Venn believes that all situations involving “randomness” concern a series of unpredictable, but equally probable, results. A slightly more complicated case is that of a shot fired “at random” from a gun whose maximum range (i.e., at forty-five-degree elevation) is three thousand yards. What is the chance the actual range will exceed two thousand yards? Here, two different domains of equally probable events are obtained, depending on whether it is assumed that the entire hemisphere of possible positions of the gun are equally probable or that the direction in which the shooter is facing is first chosen (“randomly”) and then the gun is raised (“randomly”) to a particular angular height. Taken together, how does one determine whether a given distribution is random? When the ultimate distribution is known, this is merely a matter of fact, as in the case of raindrops. When the ultimate distribution is unknown, it is a more artificial matter of counterfactually supposing the ultimate distribution known or of hypothetically extrapolating the limiting relative frequency.

The idea of determining whether a distribution is random by observing it for a while—watching the pattern of rainfall on a piece of paper or of daisies growing on a small lawn—seems rather archaic in the new world of random molecular motions. Venn, however, did give a slightly more sophisticated argument for what today would be called “pseudo-randomness.” It was in this context that he showed to have a grasp of so-called random walks, one version of which would soon become famous as the simple diffusion model of physics. Venn’s example to show that randomness refers to the resulting distribution, rather than the process that produces it, is that of the digits of pi. These had been calculated out to 7,070 places, using a formula developed by John Machin, and published in 1873 by William Shanks. A human computer (which then denoted not a machine but a person skilled in arithmetic), Shanks was an amateur and a marginal figure in the mid-Victorian mathematical community, though he did publish some fifteen papers in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, submitted on his behalf by prominent fellows such as George Stokes, George Biddell Airy, Whewell, and De Morgan. Starting in 1850 and returning to the task at intervals over more than twenty years, his biggest stunt was his pi calculation with pencil and paper, which appeared in three stages between 1853 and 1873. Shanks made a series of mistakes beginning around decimal place 530, which meant that the rest of the work was essentially for naught. Venn found it quite striking that the digits of pi would show anything resembling the kind of statistical randomness he was interested in. After all, no physical causation is involved to which to ascribe the tendency of irregular individual events (i.e., digits) to gradually become regular (i.e., to occur equally often in the long run). He wanted to show his reader that the digits of pi nonetheless provided an example of randomness. The best way to illustrate this, Venn believed, was by expressing it graphically, yet another instance of his habit of visual reasoning. He actually made a claim to originality in this regard, writing, “I do not know that any one has suggested the drawing of a line whose shape as well as position shall be of a purely random character.”66

Venn graphically illustrates the randomness of the digits of pi by using them to generate a path described by a point. His starting point is to work with a compass with eight points (numbered 0–7) to direct the movement at each step on a square lattice: 0 is north, 1 is northeast, and so on. Next, the digits 0 to 7 from the first 707 digits of pi are used by Venn as clues to the direction of the path traced. What results is a figure that may well be the first published diagram of a so-called discrete random walk (see figure 10.3). From the path’s apparent patternlessness, Venn concluded that the graph of the path generated by the chosen digits would enable the reader to comprehend the idea of a “chance arrangement.” Venn emphasized that he had drawn similar paths using digits from logarithm tables, finding the result to be much the same. Venn also briefly discusses the limiting (or “ideal”) form that such a random walk would take if the number of possible directions was infinite and the step length made indefinitely small. The result is described in terms that today are captured by the word “fractal,” which around that time were just beginning to be studied mathematically. Thus, in the “ideal case of randomness of direction,” Venn writes, the “spikiness of the random line will diminish ‘without any limit’; more generally, there is, in fact, no ‘limit’ here, intelligible to the understanding or picturable by the imagination . . . towards which we find ourselves continually approaching.”67 Venn’s random walk went largely unnoticed. Others, however, would follow the lead of his particular way of thinking about whether the digits in the decimal expansion of numbers like pi are randomly arranged.

10.3 Venn’s graph of a random walk. From The Logic of Chance (1888), 118.

At the basis of Venn’s frequency probability stood the notion of long-term regularities of aggregate phenomena. Venn became increasingly aware that such series or populations “are seldom or never found to occur in such a simple form” as might be expected from what he himself had said about them in the first edition of The Logic of Chance.68 The 1876 and 1888 editions contained a fuller and slightly more quantitative discussion of the topic. For several decades following Quetelet, it had been widely believed that most data from homogeneous populations were normally distributed, according to the familiar bell-shaped curve, if the size of the sample was made sufficiently large. “Suppose that we measure the heights of a great many adult men in any town or country,” Venn wrote, for example: “These heights will of course lie between certain extremes in each direction, and if we continue to accumulate our measures it will be found that they tend to lie continuously between these extremes.”69 This had made it possible for Quetelet and others to argue that, since they are akin to measurement errors in astronomy, human variations from the average man are mere accidents. Venn had always been suspicious of “Quetelismus,” the nickname for the exaggeration of the prevalence of the normal law, but it was in the 1870s that he finally began to spell out his criticism. “Interesting and valuable, however, as are Quetelet’s statistical investigations,” he observed in 1876, “I cannot but feel convinced that there is much in what he has written upon the subject which is erroneous . . . as regards the foundations of the science of Probability, and the philosophical questions which it involves.”70 Venn’s criticism was twofold. First, Quetelet wrongly assumed that it is always the normal (or “exponential”) law that describes the way in which observations and measurements of human features are distributed. Quetelet had shown that a great variety of social and human phenomena conformed to this law, at least the central values closest to the mean. But Quetelet had taken his zeal for symmetry too far in trying to reject as monstrosities some of the deviant extreme values on both ends of the scale. “Such a plan of rejection is quite unauthorized,” argued Venn, “for these dwarfs and giants are born into the world like their more normally sized brethren.”71 Drawing on his own 1887 letter to Nature, Venn added another criticism to Quetelet’s exclusive reliance on the symmetrical bell curve in the 1888 edition of The Logic of Chance.72

10.4 Venn’s example of an asymmetrical distribution (“The diagram represents the grouping, in respect of relative frequency, of 4857 successive barometric heights. They are from the observation of Mr. W. E. Pain, of Cambridge, and show the readings at 9 a.m. on successive mornings for about thirteen years from January 1, 1865”). From Venn’s “The Law of Error” (1887), 411. Reproduced by permission of Springer Nature.

Now that the era where Quetelet’s authority had been overvalued was drawing to a close, the time had come for statisticians to take account of other error laws and asymmetrical distributions. However brief, it was Venn’s letter, which included the example in figure 10.4, that aroused interest in this direction. Venn himself referred to recent work by Galton and Edgeworth, who had both drawn attention to the need to break down statistical data, whether of social, vital, or economic phenomena, into component parts rather than to marvel at their regularity.73 Galton and Edgeworth were, in fact, the two main sources of inspiration for the 1888 edition. Venn had gotten to know them personally. Edgeworth had read the proof sheets and discussed statistical matters with Venn, both orally and in writing. Venn’s personal and professional relation with him was less close than that with Galton, whom he had known since the mid- or late 1870s. Galton was an admirer of The Logic of Chance, a promotor of the frequency theory of probability, and one of the signatories on Venn’s candidate form for admission to the Fellowship of the Royal Society. What set Galton and Venn apart from Edgeworth, among other things, was their shared feeling that it was not enough to move beyond Quetelismus on technical grounds: its philosophical assumptions, whether explicit or implicit, needed to be discredited too. Galton, indeed, praised Venn since he shared the sentiment that “no science stood more in need of the criticisms of logicians than statistics,” adding that “Dr. Venn possessed a logical mind in an eminent degree.”74 Both Venn and Galton took issue with the very term “error law,” which Venn variously called a very “unfortunate technical term” and “a rather bold metaphor” and which Galton dismissed as “absurd” when applied to human phenomena.75 Similarly, though they themselves eventually came to adopt the term “normal,” in the sense of standard, for the bell-shaped curve, Venn and Galton each emphasized that there were other distributions and problematized the underlying connotation of “normal.”76 Most importantly, Venn’s emphasis on extreme values—the dwarfs and giants—was in line with the fundamental feature of Galton’s wide-ranging work: to use and improve on Quetelet’s statistical tools, not to get rid of variation, but to preserve and understand it.77 This was essentially Venn’s second criticism of Quetelismus, namely that of variation as deviation from a “fixed invariable human type,” closely associated with the homme moyen.78 For Quetelet, there was, for example, a true type of the Belgian from which all Belgians deviated accidentally. Venn was actually one of the first to bring out both the essentialism and the Aristotelian teleology contained in the notion of a type, which he continued to link with Bernoulli’s objective probability. “When we perform an operation . . . with a clear consciousness of what we are aiming at, we may quite correctly speak of every deviation from this as being an error,” but “when Nature presents us with a group of objects of any kind, it is using a rather bold metaphor to speak in this case also of a law of error, as if she had been aiming at something all the time, and had like the rest of us missed her mark more or less in almost every instance.”79 Here, Venn touched on the central conceptual problem that statisticians encountered in extending statistical methods from astronomical to social data: the isolation of data into homogeneous classes.80 This is what Venn in 1866, in the first edition of The Logic of Chance, had already discussed under the header of the reference class problem: that of finding the populations that can provide reliable statistical information. According to Venn, Quetelet’s notion of a type did, in a sense, apply to the individual man who possesses the mean height, mean weight, mean strength, and so on, of the homogeneous class of adult Belgians or Englishmen. The deviations from this “type” could then be said to have been produced by “innumerable small influences, partly physiological, partly physical and social.”81 But since mean height is different for different nations, it is not acceptable to simply aggregate data from different nations in a study of mean height. It may well amount to “mixing distinctly heterogeneous elements.” Venn showed awareness of the vast multitude of potentially influential factors that made any external judgment of homogeneity impossible and an a priori judgment unacceptable. One way to overcome the impasse was either to study all factors external to the data, so as to isolate all important influences, or to gather vast amounts of data, thereby rendering all residual variation negligible. Another was to create statistical tests for the evaluation of a class’s internal homogeneity. This line of work was started by Wilhelm Lexis, among others, who continued Quetelet’s method of fitting normal curves to data by focusing on “those few cases that could be bent to conform to binomial variation.”82 Venn contributed to neither development. As always, his métier was to formulate and analyze the problem situation with due philosophical depth.

What the 1888 edition of The Logic of Chance provided was an overview of another conceptual approach with roots in Quetelet’s work, that of the “English school” of Galton and Edgeworth. It also found its starting point in the normal curve but pulled it apart, dissected it, and turned it to novel use: the study of variations and differences among populations. Venn focused on averages and sought to show that within this realm there was much more variety than Quetelet recognized. It was entirely natural for Venn to do so, since long-run uniformity—the very foundation of probability theory—was essentially the same as what happens “on average.” Furthermore, it had become important to him to show that this fundamental fact could not be reduced to one mathematical law. Venn’s discussion was partly qualitative and partly quantitative. The qualitative part reflected on the nature, varieties, and uses of averages. Why do we make use of averages at all? What do we gain and lose by doing so? What different kinds of average are there, and how and why does one such kind become more appropriate than another? Taking up these questions, Venn positioned himself between the “practical man,” who was apt to overlook them, and the “mathematician,” whose discussion of them was not readily intelligible.83 This chapter was later rewritten into “On the Nature and Uses of Averages,” read before the Royal Statistical Society, of which Venn had then just become a fellow. Galton admired Venn’s contribution, writing in 1888 that “it explains what statistics cannot as well as can do, in a very masterly way.”84 Edgeworth did not like it at all, seeing in Venn a modern-day Socrates who sought to extract “profound truths from homely illustrations.”85 The quantitative part of Venn’s discussion of averages in the later editions of The Logic of Chance gave an analysis of recent probability-based statistical methods (e.g., error laws, least squares, medians, statistical scale, percentiles, regression). Venn was not a statistician, but he knew that anyone writing on probability in the 1870s and 1880s had to familiarize himself with this rapidly growing field. For the 1876 edition, he had relied on the help of James W. L. Glaisher, second wrangler in 1871 and Wittgenstein’s first tutor, in writing the chapter on the method of least squares.86 About a decade later, Venn wrote to Galton that “I am engaged on a new edition of my Logic of Chance, & naturally want to work through . . . what you have written upon the subject of ‘Law of Error’ during the past few years.”87 For some two or three years, Venn threw himself into studying Galton’s “Statistics by Intercomparison, with Remarks on the Law of Frequency of Error” (1875), “Typical Laws of Heredity” (1877), and other “pamphlets,” as well as Natural Inheritance (1889), of which Venn published a review-cum-summary for Mind.88 Drawing on the burst of groundbreaking albeit rather impenetrable work coming from Galton and Edgeworth, Venn sought to explain the principles underlying their methods and to “disentangle these principles from the symbols in which they are clothed.”89

Venn’s contributions to statistics met with a mixed reception, especially among the fellows of the Royal Statistical Society, which were themselves divided into two camps: one of descriptive statisticians (“fact-gatherers”) and another of inferential statisticians (“curve-fitters”). Whereas the latter tended to find Venn’s “meta-statistical contemplations” valueless, the former thought they were clever but also rather startling.90 Edgeworth’s hostility and personal attacks seem to have bothered Venn. In November 1889 Venn wrote to Galton that he was “anxious to put up F. Y. Edgeworth’s name for the Roy. Soc. [as] I have long had a very high opinion of his work.”91 A few years later, however, Venn pulled back his support, writing to Galton:

I am sorry to hear what you say about Edgeworth, but I think your remarks exactly hit the point. I have a very high opinion of the aggregate of his contributions to the theory of statistics, & have felt the help of his work in a number of directions; but it is difficult to point to any single essay of his which, like K. Pearson’s, is decisive at once in the way of power & originality. I feel strongly that Edgeworth ought to be on the R.S., . . . but the more I think about it the more difficult I feel it to say anything quite definite which ought to decide others in his favour.92

Venn more or less blocked Edgeworth’s election to the Royal Society, of which he indeed never became a fellow. He also played a part in the creation of his postmortem status as “one of the least-known major figures” in statistics, since Venn’s 1887 letter to Nature indirectly provoked the battle between Edgeworth and Pearson on so-called skew curves.93

Galton was the most prominent of those who did appreciate Venn’s statistical work. Early in 1890, Galton would encourage Venn to write a “scientific-popular Introduction to the theory of statistics,” for which there was a good opening now that a course, Theory of Statistics, had, upon Venn’s prodding, been formally introduced into the Moral Sciences Tripos at Cambridge (see figure 10.5).94 Venn, in fact, gave what was the very first lecture course on statistics in Britain, in the Michaelmas term of 1890, which was continued in this form until the late 1890s. One year later, Venn would compile a fifty-page, handwritten manuscript (with some nineteen tables and graphs) under this same title, listing Galton, Edgeworth, and Wilhelm Lexis as his main sources. As Venn would write to Galton in August 1891:

10.5 Table of contents of Venn’s course Theory of Statistics (1891). Reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

I am gradually putting together my ideas for my lectures on “Theory of Statistics.” . . . But there are difficulties. Our Cambridge scheme, admirable as it is for those who study along the main routes, does certainty not give much encouragement to those who want to turn down what is considered a by-lane. . . . So the existence of an audience or class becomes somewhat doubtful. But the benefit to the writer of the lectures is mainly in the fact of having to put his thoughts in order, whatever he do with them afterwards.95

Another sign of recognition of Venn’s foray into statistics would come when Karl Pearson (“a perfect stranger”) invited him in February 1893 to take over his lectures on the laws of chance at Gresham College, London.96 Venn accepted the invitation and on Tuesday 18 April, 6–7 p.m., delivered a lecture, “On Curves of Error,” to a popular audience of some three hundred.97

Psychophysics and Anthropometry

The story of the rise of physical science at Victorian Cambridge, a university formerly preoccupied with classics and mathematics, is a fascinating one.98 It tells of dramatic changes in the balance of power between the university and the colleges and of the ideal of liberal education. Many parts of the story have been explored in great detail, such as that of the founding of the Cavendish Physical Laboratory under James Clerk Maxwell and Michael Foster’s Laboratory of Physiology. What has received far less attention are the two laboratory projects in which Venn participated, one related to psychophysics and the other to anthropometry. It is, therefore, interesting to trace Venn’s steps, not only because they shed new light on the birth of experimental psychology at Cambridge but also, and especially, for adding another dimension to the larger story of the rise of physical science at the Victorian university: that of the significance of unofficial, informal, and extramural support needed to do research in “progressive” fields that were very much in a state of flux.

As early as in 1877, some one or two years before William James at Harvard and Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig, Venn and James Ward had proposed that the university establish a laboratory of psychophysics. Although documentary evidence is lacking, in that year they allegedly—unofficially (and unsuccessfully)—asked the Board for Moral Sciences to apply to the General Board of Studies for a grant for “psycho-physical apparatus.”99 Ward, who was nine years younger than Venn, had obtained first class honors in the Moral Sciences Tripos in 1874 as a noncollegiate student and won a Trinity fellowship in 1875 with a dissertation entitled “The Relation of Physiology to Psychology,” of which the sections concerning Fechner’s psychophysics appeared in the first volume of Mind.100 Ward had already studied under Hermann Lotze in Göttingen in 1869–70 and in 1876–77 again traveled to Germany to study at Carl Ludwig’s Physiological Institute in Leipzig. Upon his return to Cambridge in 1879, he briefly continued his physiological research under Michael Foster. Venn and Ward would officially become colleagues in 1881, when Sidgwick ensured that Ward was elected to a college lectureship, though he had then already been lecturing in psychology at Trinity for a couple of years. Ward owed his career in large part to Sidgwick, whose dual role as representative of the Board for Moral Sciences and president of the Society for Psychical Research made him keen and suitably placed to promote the application of scientific methods to psychical phenomena (which he himself did) and of physical experiments to sensations (which he wanted Ward to carry out). Ward’s settling at Trinity marked the start of a decades-long campaign to make psychology an independent and accepted part of Cambridge intellectual life, a development in which W. H. R. Rivers and C. S. Myers would be the key figures, with backing from Ward.

Another attempt was made in 1886, when Venn and Ward issued a pamphlet addressed to “Members of the Moral Science Board” in which they asked for an “outlay of from £75 to £100” and a “quiet well-lighted room” to conduct different kinds of psychophysical experiments (e.g., to ascertain the conditions of sense discriminations, the constituents of sense perception and the time occupied by simple mental processes). The pamphlet showed awareness of the pleas that would prevent the establishment of a psychological laboratory at Cambridge until 1912–13. It was objected, for example, that methods, equipment, and techniques chiefly associated with physics could not be applied to a philosophical subject matter. This might be the source of the legend often repeated, that a psychological laboratory would “insult religion by putting the human soul in a pair of scales.”101 It was also “so often and so vehemently urged” that psychology “can never become scientific because it is without any means for exact analysis or measurement.”102 Both the Board for Moral Sciences, with Sidgwick as representative, and the Board for Biology and Geology, in which Foster was prominent, agreed with Venn and Ward that the time had come for Cambridge to follow up on recent steps taken elsewhere to give psychology scientific status. There were now, for example, G. S. Hall’s Psychophysical Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University (1883) and William James’s Psychological Laboratory (1885). But the General Board for Studies refused to press the Senate for finance. When the Board for Moral Sciences repeated the application in 1888, once again with support from the Board for Biology and Geology, they were again denied. It was only in the summer of 1891 that the General Board for Studies would state that “a sum of £50 paid from the Common University Fund be placed at the disposal of the Special Board for Moral Sciences for the purpose of instruments needed for research and demonstrations in psychophysics.”103 A few weeks later it was officially announced in the Council of the Senate: “On the report of the General Board of Studies on the purchase of instruments for psychophysics, Professor Sidgwick said that the expenditure had received the approval of the Financial Board.”104 Venn and Ward’s fourteen-year period of lobbying was over: they had their instruments and managed to secure some space for them in the room that Foster set apart for psychological work in his Physiological Laboratory, then recently established thanks to a gift from Sidgwick. But the development of experimental psychology at Cambridge had just begun.

Another major player in this story was James McKeen Cattell, a former PhD student of Wundt at Leipzig (1886) who would become professor of psychology in Pennsylvania (1889) and head of the Department of Psychology at Columbia University (1891). Cattell arrived in Cambridge in September 1886, where Venn, Sidgwick, Foster, and Ward each supported his effort to establish a psychological (or, more precisely, “psychometric”) laboratory, continuing with the kind of work he had done in Leipzig. After a failed attempt to use Foster’s physiological rooms, several departments and faculties were approached to find a place where Cattell’s own apparatus might be installed. Cattell ran into much the same problems that had faced the physicists: “All the buildings are very crowded. Some of the colleges are rich, but the university itself is poor, and finds it expensive to house . . . laboratories and museums.”105 Finally, in October 1887 J. J. Thomson, head of the Cavendish Laboratory, gave Cattell permission to install the apparatus for research there.106 What made the informal laboratory possible was not only the absence of financial demands but, apparently, also the strong support of Venn and Sidgwick, who had earlier supported the physiological laboratory. Between 1887 and 1889, when he returned to America, taking his apparatus with him, Cattell used the unofficial psychological laboratory to perform experiments on the association of ideas, sight, and hearing. However brief, Cattell’s presence at Cambridge stimulated much interest in experimental psychology among the members of the university community. Venn’s 1888 edition of The Logic of Chance contained several references to “Fechner and his followers in psycho-physical measurement,” to whose work he had been introduced by Cattell.107 After Cattell’s departure around the beginning of 1889, it was Venn who wished to perform experiments similar to Cattell’s as an extension of another endeavor in which he had become involved: Galton’s anthropometric laboratory at Cambridge. The connections between psychophysics, psychometrics, and anthropometry had not been lost on Cattell and Galton.108 Already during his period in Leipzig, Cattell had been in frequent correspondence with Galton about it.

Before the arrival of Cattell at Cambridge, Francis Galton had presented the Rede Lecture of 1884, for which he chose as his topic “the nature, principles and objects of the quantitative estimate of some of the less commonly and less easily measured of the human faculties.” The address awakened an interest in anthropometry among several Cambridge dons, including Venn, who in 1885 joined the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland as its secretary.109 It was in that same year that Galton had set up a very popular public Anthropometric Laboratory at the International Health Exhibition in South Kensington, London, where people paid a three-pence fee to have their physical and mental features measured.110 The public success of the laboratory, which had provided Galton with his first large data set for his study of the British population, and the warm reception of his Rede Lecture led to the suggestion of a similar laboratory being set up in Cambridge. Around January 1886, the Cambridge Philosophical Society, established in 1819, was contacted with the proposal to take the stewardship of some of Galton’s anthropometric instruments. The society’s council accepted and set up a committee to superintend their display. It was apparently in this role that Venn, a fellow of the society, took up it on himself to find a suitable room in which the measurements could be carried out, which turned out to be rather difficult as the university had little available space. As Venn would report in “Cambridge Anthropometry,” first presented at a meeting of the Anthropological Institute in April 1888:

At first the committee-room of the [Cambridge] Union Society was put at our disposal, but this was not very long available, as some demur was made by the authorities there to the use of the room by undergraduates who were not members of the Society. After a time, the library of the Philosophical Society, situated in the centre of the new museums and lecture rooms, was secured, and the measurements were taken there by Mr. [Horace] White, the Librarian of the Society.111

By February 1886, the Cambridge Anthropometric Laboratory was ready for use. A sign was fixed to the outside of the building, which since 1881 had been open to all members of the university, and after two months the physical and mental features of some two hundred students had been measured.

Galton’s academic purpose in having his apparatus set up in Cambridge was various: to gather data on a homogeneous Cambridge audience, to study “the correlation of physical and mental powers” (as Venn would call it in an 1893 paper in the Monist), and to refine his apparatus, in close association with his cousin Horace Darwin’s Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company, and develop his statistical techniques using real-world examples.112 The first Cambridge results were presented by Venn at the Anthropological Institute in 1888. This paper was never published, but Galton would summarize it in Nature.113 Following the predictions made by twenty-five college tutors concerning the tripos results of their pupils, Venn had divided the students into three groups: Class A (“first-class men”), Class B (“honor men”), and Class C (“poll men”). Next, he divided the students into age brackets and calculated the “head product,” or relative brain volume, for each student by multiplying the length, breadth, and height of the students’ heads. Venn’s conclusion that “men who obtain high honours have . . . considerably larger brains than others” was put into doubt by two anonymous authors “F. M. T.” and “H J. P.,” writing in Nature, who Venn tried to identify.114 Both raised questions about whether the head products were really proportional to cranial capacity and about possible errors of measurement brought about either by the instruments or by the librarian “Mr. White.” Galton responded almost immediately with a letter to the editor of Nature, where he addressed the concerns, agreeing that the analysis should be carried out again and more carefully with a larger sample set.115 A few months later, in October 1889, he wrote another letter to Nature. Galton, referring explicitly to the criticism “on the trustworthiness of the head measures at Cambridge and on the deductions made by myself from the results obtained by Dr. Venn,” that Venn was “about to discuss a second batch.”116 Venn discussed the new results—measurements of 1,450 students, of which 1,095 were taken into account—in a much-expanded paper published in 1889.117 During the interim period of collecting, tabulating, and interpreting, Venn found out that in real-life statistical work, practical and theoretical difficulties were often inseparable. For example, the attempt to determine “the probable error of single head measures” and to estimate the “degree of reliance to be placed on the mean value of any given number of head measures” depended on several factors, ranging from instrumental shortcomings to inaccuracies of measurement and “Mr. White’s” lack of measurement skill.118 “As regards the new source of error [that of the imperfect measurer],” Venn asked Galton in October 1889, “is it not a case of the superposition of ‘independent errors’, & to be estimated in the same manner as regards its influence on the accuracy of our results? I mean that if c(1) is the ‘prob.er.’ of the men’s own dimensions, & c(2) the ‘prob.er.’ of Mr. White in measuring them, we ought to enlarge our standard of accuracy in the ratio + c(2)² : c, ?”119 The passage is characteristic of the humble position that Venn assumed vis-à-vis Galton on statistical matters, asking questions, following up on advice, and sometimes drawing attention to “little points” that Galton himself considered to be “blunders.”120 Venn was aware of the statistical methods that could be used to deal with the effects of measurement errors, but he strongly felt that “any scheme of allowing for errors is [only] a makeshift for removing them.”121 Indeed, he later admitted to have taken for granted that the “errors (in the literal sense of that rather unfortunate technical term) committed by the observer, or involved in the mechanism of the instrument” were actually “insignificant.”122 For Venn, in the 1889 paper, the central question was not whether the largest head meant higher chances of becoming senior wrangler, but rather how large amounts of raw data could be analyzed to lead to meaningful conclusions. Venn applied to the anthropometric data statistical concepts that had been invented by Galton in the late 1860s: percentiles on a statistical scale, which he later called “statistics by intercomparison.” The dubious idea was that that an individual’s talents could be assigned the numerical value corresponding to its percentile in the curve of “deviations from an average”: the middlemost (or median) talent had value 0 (“mediocrity”), an individual at the upper had the value 1 (representing one probable error above mediocrity), and so on.123 Venn liked the method because it could be used to show a student at once where he lay in comparison with all other students. He also considered the wider implications of this kind of statistical analysis of large data sets, comparing those from Cambridge and South Kensington. His main interest was to use these data to examine how “probable errors” could be calculated and understood on the basis of “the theory of Probability.”124 Rather than being a mere technical exercise, it allowed Venn to argue that the variations between the groups A, B, and C—as well as the mean of these compared to that at South Kensington—were real and not caused by probable error of measurement. It is an example of the fact that Galton’s methods, as Pearson would later write, “enabled us to reach real knowledge . . . in many branches of enquiry where opinion only had hitherto held sway. It relieved us from the old superstition that where causal relationships could not be traced, there exact or mathematical inquiry was impossible.”125

One year later, in 1890, Venn would publish another paper on the head sizes and grades of Cambridge undergraduates together with Galton.126 Like the 1889 study, it essentially contradicted the main conclusion drawn in 1888, thereby anticipating the results of Cattell’s student Clark Wissler and Karl Pearson from the turn of the century: there was no marked correlation between “intellectual and physical capacities.”127 The first-class men’s heads were no bigger than the heads of lesser mortals; neither did they really differ in their other physical characteristics.

Like the other laboratories that later followed in Dublin, Eton, and Oxford, Venn’s and Galton’s Cambridge Anthropometric Laboratory not only served “pure” research purposes. These laboratories encouraged self-observation, for example, and became sites for the production and communication of scientific knowledge. But there were other issues at stake too—linked to Galton’s larger project of eugenics: national, imperial, and racial. Since the late 1860s, Galton had advocated the need to establish and perfect the average mental and physical abilities of the Englishman in his struggle with other nations and races.128 Following up on one of Galton’s papers from 1889, where he argued that physical qualifications were to be taken into account in Civil Service and other state examinations, Venn and Galton suggested in 1890 that breathing power best served the public interest, in this regard, since it is “correlated, on the whole, with a higher general physical superiority than is the case with the other qualities.”129 In another paper, from 1893, in which he returned to the 1890 results, Venn gave a lengthy discussion of Indian students at Cambridge. There is a little bundle with cards on “Indian students” in the archives of the Philosophical Society. The cards do not have a place to mention race, but they do have one for birthplace and for skin tone, limited to “pale,” “ruddy,” “dark,” or “freckled.” Venn’s reflection on the pile of Indian cards was much in the spirit of Galton’s concerns over the effects of alien influences on the nation’s average abilities. “So long as we deal with any large homogeneous class,” Venn argued, it was possible to “assume the independence of the physical and mental qualities. But when the class is not homogeneous, this postulate is no longer sound”:

Broadly speaking, the Cambridge students . . . are a very homogeneous body. . . . But there is found amongst them, at the present day, a sub-class of very different [i.e., Indian] origin. . . . These men, it need hardly be said, do not come from the fighting races of the Northwest of the British Indian Empire, but almost exclusively consist of highly educated Bengalees. . . . So long as their numbers are relatively small, probably nothing but good comes of this; but we may fairly ask what would come to pass if, in course of time, whether owing to their real capacity, their disposition to the career, or their relative population, the number of selected candidates of these nationalities were to become preponderant.130

It was true that some of these Indian students had, by their success in the Indian Civil Service Examination, earned governmental posts. And, to Venn, it also seemed fair to say that this was as it should be; they had risen to the top of the list and had, thereby, proved their fitness for the work to which the examination was the portal. But, Venn asked: “These clever Asiatics, who . . . can often hold their own against their European competitors in the examination-room, how do they compare with them physically?”131 For Venn, who had observed that the bodily qualities of Indian students were below average in almost every category, the conclusion was obvious: “Those who admit that physical vigor has something to do with the foundation and retention of empires will allow that such facts as these may someday stand in need of careful revision and discussion.”132 Galton’s scientific work pulled Venn into new territory, providing a very rare look into a subject that would only resurface in ten or twenty years’ time: Venn’s political views.

11

Empirical Logic

(1889)

The 1880s were Venn’s most productive decade as a logician, as he published Symbolic Logic, the much-expanded third edition of The Logic of Chance, and what would be his final book on logic, the six-hundred-page Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic. It was also the decade in which he quit logic, having grown weary of it. Around the time that he completed Principles, he donated his private collection of logic books to the University Library, including, tellingly enough, Mill’s System of Logic and Jevons’s Principles of Science. Venn was then already pursuing new avenues of research. He built on his knowledge of probability in his experimental-statistical work on anthropometry and his researches into college history.

Venn’s aim in Principles was to provide a systematic account of the scientific outlook on logic, which he described to Galton as standing somewhere between Mill and Jevons. The reference to “inductive” was an acknowledgment of his debt to Mill, but the reference to “empirical” marked his agreement with Jevons, that objective certainty about the world was not possible for human beings. What should have been the climax of Venn’s logical development—from an ardent follower to a critical reader of Mill—would come to be perceived as his least original book, “a somewhat diffuse commentary on Mill’s System of Logic.”1 The book does suffer from many defects: it lacks internal unity, it contains little reference to contemporary debate, it is unclear for whom the book is written, and, despite its admission that all knowledge is uncertain, it makes no connection at all between induction and probability. But it was nonetheless influential among the next generations of Cambridge philosophers, if only—such as for McTaggart—as a paradigmatic example of a tradition that needed to be overthrown or—such as for C. D. Broad, and for John Dewey in America—as a critical point of departure for an alternative position. Rather than dismissing it for its obvious flaws, it seems more fruitful to try to understand the problem situation to which Venn believed the book to be an answer. Together with the Hulsean Lectures, Principles arguably provides an important source for a richer history of nineteenth-century British philosophy and early Cambridge analytic philosophy, more specifically—one without any gaps.

There are two key elements to Venn’s Principles. The first is that, next to formal logic—traditional and algebraic—and inductive logic, it also included scientific methodology, importing one of his interests outside logic into that field. This tradition of scientific logic, or what Dewey would call the “newer logic,”2 is today largely forgotten and hence often neglected. It is associated with English figures such as Bernard Bosanquet and F. H. Bradley and German authors like Hermann Lotze, Sigwart, and Wundt. Indeed, the works to which Venn compared his Principles were Sigwart’s Logik (1873–78) and Wundt’s Logik (1880–83), both of which he praised in reviews for Mind.3 What these works shared was that they examined logic—both inductive and deductive, along traditional syllogistic lines—in its relation to the principles of knowledge and scientific method, which was taken to cover the language, standards, and units of the natural sciences, among other things. Another common feature is that, except for Jevons’s Principles of Science, these books were all written from the perspective of some sort of philosophical idealism. The general standpoint of Sigwart and Wundt, for example, was that the purpose of logic is to study the psychological conditions that make scientific knowledge possible; as such, logic is both independent from and bound to the subject matter of science. Venn’s deliberate mention of both Sigwart and Wundt is significant, because it suggests that Principles was not written, or at least not merely, as a commentary on Mill but as a contribution to scientific logic. Venn drew on the work of Sigwart and Wundt to express his “criticism” and “divergence” from Mill as much as he built on Mill’s “general attitude towards phenomena” to water down Sigwart’s and Wundt’s idealism.4 What resulted was a certain kind of conventionalism, one where logic is tied to the assumptions that condition science and where these assumptions are allowed to change over time. The second key element of Principles is that it was part of, and exemplary for, a broader development in which Venn shared with his moral sciences colleagues from the mid-Victorian generation, such as Sidgwick, Ward, and Marshall: a shift away from Mill’s utilitarian-empiricist project and toward a more diffuse philosophical outlook, seeking connections between different fields of study and combining elements of pragmatism, idealism, conventionalism, and evolutionary conceptions. This was the local historical background of twentieth-century Cambridge philosophy. It shows that the “crude” and “old-fashioned” empiricism that McTaggart taught his pupils G. E. Moore and Russell to reject was as much a case of Vergessenmachen as G. E. Moore’s and Russell’s analytic revolution was partly a case of myth making.5 It was through the intermediary figures of W. E. Johnson and C. D. Broad, among others, that The Logic of Chance, Symbolic Logic, and Principles continued to be read and studied at Cambridge, before probability and inductive logic would reemerge there again in the 1920s and 1930s.

Origins

“At present I am at work,” Venn wrote to Galton in May 1888, “on a somewhat systematic attempt to write a Treatise on Inductive Logic (something between Mill & Jevons in respect of scope & general treatment) which has occupied much of my time for many years past.”6 For Venn, as for most of those of the “middle generation,” who would come to logic with a previous Mathematical Tripos training, Mill was the “original guiding influence.”7 Like Tennyson had been the “dominant poet who sings for all,” Mill had been the “dominant teacher who expounds for all.”8 When Venn first read Mill in 1859, at the age of twenty-four or twenty-five, he had entered a “new world of thought and feeling,” which he never entirely left behind.9 “Nothing which is really new,” Venn would observe in a letter from the turn of the century, “can be, after youth, of any great interest or value. I am speaking of course of speculative truths, not of practical inventions.”10 From 1862 onward, it had become Venn’s responsibility to teach Mill’s System of Logic to moral sciences students, preaching the book’s empiricist gospel at Cambridge. Among the young reformers who gathered around Grote, Venn had soon become known as one of the most dedicated followers of Mill. Like his two other books, Venn’s Principles not only would appear on the reading list for the Moral Sciences Tripos but also contained the substance of lectures on logic delivered at Cambridge, at first to members of Caius but afterward to students generally at the university.

The main outlines of Principles had been sketched long ago, and the bulk of its twenty-five chapters had been delivered for many years in almost the exact same form. “A discussion rather than a treatise,” the book reflected the fact that over the course of the 1860s to the 1880s the influence of Mill had become one of “criticism and divergence quite as much as that of acceptance.”11 Already in 1866, Venn had sided with Whewell in his famous debate with Mill, writing that induction contains a conceptual element “which is introduced by the mind, and is not found in the things.”12 Venn’s stream of logic papers published in the 1870s had shown a gradual move away from full commitment toward a strongly modified acceptance of Mill’s general, “material” or “objective,” standpoint. Venn defended Mill against Jevons, dismissing the idea that science works through hypotheses, which have higher or lower probability. He agreed with Jevons, however, that Mill had attached far too much certainty to the process and results of induction, even though probability played a negligible role in Principles. Venn initially simply defended Mill’s material view of logic against conceptualism. But between 1876 and 1879 there would follow some four papers in which Venn acknowledged the impossibility of “a purely objective treatment of logic.”13 Given that the human mind had not yet obtained perfect knowledge of the world, logic could not be the matter-of-fact science concerned solely with “laws of things,” as Mill had envisioned it.14 Venn combined Jevons’s insistence on the uncertainty of induction with Spencer, Read, and Sigwart’s emphasis on what Venn took to be the “relative” or “conditional” nature of all knowledge, arguing in 1879 that the subject matter of logic was the “sum-total of ‘existences considered as objective.’”15

Venn’s internal criticism of Mill was supplemented by the need to account for the external pressure on Mill’s position coming from developments in deductive logic. Perhaps the central claim of A System of Logic—and of Mill’s empiricist project at large—had been that induction is the only form of real inference and that the proper function of syllogistic deduction is merely evaluative. Hence, Mill never really took seriously the work of De Morgan, Boole, or any other algebraic logician. Venn did, and it was largely due to this influence that he came to question Mill’s famous—or notorious—petitio principii charge against the syllogism. It convinced Venn that in complex cases of reasoning, those going beyond Mill’s “All men are mortal / Socrates is a man / Therefore, Socrates is mortal,” it was often very difficult to see what conclusion follows from given premises, that is, to recognize that the major premise contains the conclusion. Indeed, the whole point of Symbolic Logic had been to show that symbolic methods were useful to aid in this task. At the same time, Venn rejected the conceptualism of the algebraic logicians. He had gone to considerable lengths to provide algebraic logic with a real-world foundation, so to speak, mainly through his theory of existential import, which was supposed to show that particular propositions, unlike universal propositions, always carry with them the implication that there exist things denominated by their terms. The other side of the challenge still lay ahead: to establish a new system of material or objective logic that took account of the fact that, since there is no ultimate ground of induction to which deduction can be reduced, it may also be said to involve inference and, hence, be epistemically illuminating of the process of acquiring new knowledge.

Altogether, the problem situation that Venn created for himself was to mediate between a number of opposing traditions: the inductive (“material”) logic of Mill, the algebraic (“conceptualist”) logic of Boole, and the new (“post-Kantian”) scientific logic of the German school. Venn never solved it, but it was original and prescient, considering, for instance, the steps that Russell and other early analytic philosophers would have to take to combine mathematics and the empirical sciences into a new scientific philosophy.16 Venn’s implicit strategy in the 1880s seems to have been to use aspects from the work of Sigwart and Wundt to reconcile (his own, critical version of) Mill’s informal inductive logic with (his own interpretation of) Boole’s algebraic deductive logic under the banner of “empirical logic.” It was of course not at all obvious that Mill and Boole could be woven together. Jevons had tried, but he had essentially abandoned all that was specific to both Mill and Boole. One major difficulty for Venn was that he wished to remain committed to what he took to be the spirit of Mill and Boole, and these he apparently, and problematically, held to be compatible. Another difficulty for Venn’s strategy, perhaps a fatal one, was that the post-Kantian logicians, whose work he wanted to use as a bridge, were opposed to formal logic, let alone to algebraic logic, and yet did not accept empiricism. They argued against De Morgan and Boole that formal logic, whether traditional or algebraic, was by itself trivial and empty and against Mill that scientific inquiry and logic were not reducible to each other. It is a serious weakness in Venn’s thinking that he never really thought these and other tensions through, not even in Principles. Instead, the only position he defends is the pragmatic one that says that everything that is useful for a certain purpose should be kept and should have its own relative place within the discipline of logic. Venn never aims for the “true” view, whether of the form of propositions or of the syllogism, but assigns himself the task of giving an exposé of the dominant views and describing their pros and cons. The downside of this was that he gave the impression that there was nothing at stake in logic, say between the proponents and critics of formal logic or between those who said that logic is a theory of judgments and those who said it is a theory of propositions. It would make Principles look dated even at publication.

Like other Cambridge philosophers of his generation, such as Sidgwick, Venn turned away from Mill’s utilitarian-empiricist project, for partly internal and partly external reasons. Because the position he ended up with was far from clear-cut, arguably not even in his own mind, posterity has tended to forget or neglect him, or both. When Venn is mentioned, he is often characterized as something of a “muddled” or “disaffected” Millian, or else as the kind of philosopher to which the British Idealists, who burst on the scene in the 1890s, served as a welcome antidote. There is some truth in this. Jevons once noted that Venn admired Mill so much more than he did, which made them look at the same things in exactly opposite ways. By the 1880s, Venn rejected much of what Mill had said, but he remained committed to the voice with which Mill had spoken. Venn agreed with many of the criticisms that Jevons had leveled against Mill throughout the 1870s. Whereas Jevons turned these criticisms into an anti-Millian position, Venn became what for lack of a better term might be called a “non-Millian” follower of Mill. His empirical logic went under, over, and beyond Mill, but he did not cut the ties with his intellectual mentor. Jevons’s basic ideas—that all knowledge is essentially deductive, that induction is simply the inverse application of deduction, and that inductive logic should therefore be grounded on probability theory—was not so much false as simply unacceptable to Venn. The focus on what Venn did not or, owing to his watered-down commitment to Mill, could not do should not distract from observing what he did do, and from seeing that Principles did exert a not inconsiderable influence on others. Dewey, the third of the three great American pragmatists, next in line to Peirce and James, was one of the very few to recognize that Venn’s mature position was such an “independent rendering of Mill as to be worthy of more attention.”17 It is an interesting fact about the twin histories of early analytic philosophy and pragmatism that the first paper Dewey ever published, in 1890, was essentially a commentary on Venn’s Principles. Peirce before him had taken notice of Venn’s work in probability theory. James would mention the Hulsean Lectures of 1869 in his Principles of Psychology. Dewey was interested in Venn because it was through an immanent critique of his position that Dewey hoped to justify his own “organic” or “Hegelian” view of logic.18 What Dewey took to be original about Venn’s rendering of Mill was its idealism or constructivism. This was essentially the idea that the objects—rather than the concepts—standing at the bottom of the whole of logic were not the result of observations but of “mental acts” whereby they were first recognized as being objects. This aspect, indeed, contains much of what may be said to have been original about Principles: the view of logic as dualistic, the conventionalist basis of logical and epistemic processes, the evolutionary origins of knowledge, and the coherentist view of truth. It is on these topics, rather than to those where Venn more or less repeated Mill or Jevons—causation, the methods of induction, standards and units—or to Venn’s many “trifling” and “hair-splitting distinctions,”19 that the following discussion is focused.

The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic

Venn opened Principles with a three-step definition of what he understood by logic. First, he accepted Bacon’s and Mill’s characterization of logic as ars artium, the science of science that studies the process of reasoning by which knowledge is extended. “Logic,” Venn wrote, “investigates the various sciences [and] makes abstraction of [the] forms of them. By such abstraction we obtain certain processes, such as those of induction and deduction [and] certain results, such as terms, propositions, definitions, and so forth. The elements thus common to all sciences and special to none, make up what we call Logic.”20 Venn next pointed to the fact that logic is intrinsically dualistic: “Logic is not an ultimate science, in the sense of being concerned directly with really first principles of any kind, [but] takes for granted that a great deal has already been decided . . . in various directions. . . . Logic is neither a purely objective [‘physical’] nor a subjective [‘conceptual’] science. It involves both elements, consisting essentially in the relation of one to the other. . . . This twofold aspect . . . seems to me almost peculiar to Logic amongst the sciences.”21 This understanding “must always have been in some degree present to the minds of men,” wrote a reviewer in the Athenaeum, but Venn was the first to follow it through to its logical conclusion, emphasizing that logic, like science, is concerned with the changing relation between object and subject over time: “[He rejects] at once the theory of the Hamiltonian school, who affect to consider thinking in and for itself alone, and the theory of the objective school, who regard all correct thinking as a mere reproduction of external nature . . . , instead of what it is, a very slow and gradual approximation to the production of a picture truer than we shall ever reach.”22 Venn at one point also presented Principles as replacing Mill’s “non-evolutionary” logical system for an evolutionary one.23 Rather than developing his historicist alternative in any detail, Venn used a rather crude model of historical stages, distinguishing between the primitive, popular, and scientific understanding of logical notions like definition, classification, and causation. Venn’s awareness of historical contingency is important, however. First, since it is suggestive of a broader Cambridge tendency, shared by Sidgwick, Marshall and Ward, among others: namely, that of the extension of evolutionary thinking into academic fields other than biology.24 Second, because it introduced the factor of time into logic, tying it not just to science but to the entire evolution of human knowledge: “Many of the objects which fill our categories, and answer to our general names, simply did not exist in the days of our earliest savage ancestors. . . . The position we take up is that in these matters, so far as Logic is concerned, the present is to legislate for the past. . . . What we do is to project our own present view of the world into remote times and places.”25 This is what made Venn’s system scientific: it analyzed science in its abstract form, and it understood logical notions from the modern perspective made possible by present-day science. At the same time, Venn emphasized, “it does not, or should not, profess to be anything else than an interpretation of remote times by the schedules and forms of our own time” for it would be “absurd to suppose that our ways of regarding the world can be final. At some future stage, they will presumably stand to us as we do to the prehistorical savage.”26 Because of Principles Venn acquired the reputation not only of being skeptical—for there were only arbitrary conventions to make up for induction’s lack of solid grounds—but also of being “relativist.”

It is telling that the criticism leveled at Principles focused mainly on its form rather than on its content. Almost all reviews took issue with the book’s title and structure, which was as follows. The first five chapters, covering some 150 pages, sketch the conventionalist foundations of Venn’s system. The bulky middle of the book had more or less the same structure as Jevons’s Principles of Science, Sigwart’s Logik, and Wundt’s Logik. After a two-hundred-page discussion of a selection of traditional logical topics (terms, propositions, judgments, definition, division, etc., but not the syllogism)—where the only gem was the chapter on hypothetical and disjunctive propositions, later taken up by W. E. Johnson—there followed a seventy-page analysis of induction, taken over from Mill. Venn deviated from Mill in two ways. First, following Jevons, he does not believe in the possibility of discovering causes, in the sense of necessary and sufficient conditions. Second, he argues for a modified acceptance of Mill’s view on the syllogism in relation to induction, arguing that deduction sometimes does involve inference. The remaining 150 pages of Principles consist of various chapters on scientific methodology (standards and units, explanation and verification), epistemological issues (measurement of space and time, ideals of knowledge), the possibility of a universal language and the relation between practice and theory. All reviewers—Read in Mind, Edgeworth in The Academy, James Sully in Nature, among others—were disappointed to have to conclude that the new book from the author of such “important works” as Logic of Chance was both too long and too narrow.27 “There seems, indeed, a surprising lack of systematic arrangement, as if the author had sat down to write without a clear plan before him,” Sully wrote in Nature.28 Some “time-worn topics” and many “curiosities of thought” were discussed with “hair-splitting” precision, but of “a large part of common logic” not even “such scanty information as Mill gives” was provided.29 Hence, the reader was warned “not to expect a complete systematic treatise” as the book did not “take us in an orderly manner through all the well-recognized divisions of the subject.”30 Principles was also criticized for its title, which promised too much and said too little.31 On the one hand, not even when read as a treatise on inductive logic could Principles be called complete, since “some of the most important matters appertaining to induction”—notably hypothesis, probability, inverse deduction—were “altogether passed by, or only just referred to.”32 On the other hand, following Jevons, Sigwart, and Wundt, Principles “included so much more than we are accustomed to call Logic” that Venn “perhaps did well not to call it by that name.”33 It is clear that at the end of the 1880s, the foundations and the scope of logic were still unsettled. Read, for example, simply refused to accept the chapters on scientific method as a legitimate part of logic. He suggested that “Methodology”—which he took to refer to “the application of Logical principles to scientific procedure”—would have been the appropriate title for the book.34

Foundations of Logic

The first chapters of Principles together gave a prolegomenon to Venn’s empirical system of logic. It outlined the physical and subjective foundations of logic, understood as conventional principles drawn from other disciplines (metaphysics, grammar, physics, psychology, etc.).35 Or, as the reviewer in the Athenaeum wrote, Venn’s system assumed “without hesitation that there is an independent world to be known and a mind to know it, [and] brings these two into relation by assigning in detail the objective conditions required to make the world knowable, and the subjective conditions, aspirations, tendencies, and principles which make our minds capable of apprehending . . . a knowable and systematic universe.”36 This may be said to have been the conventionalist twist that Venn gave to post-Kantian logic. “Dr. Venn has done good service,” Sully wrote in Nature, “in showing how much work of the mind has gone before to the construction of the world of objects with which the logician sets out.”37 Rather than intrinsic features of the mind, however, the principles that made logic possible according to Venn had the form of assumptions derived from other, ever-changing fields of study. The principles were of two kinds: objective or physical and subjective or mental. Together, they made up “the world as the logician regards it.”38 Much like Dewey, Sully recognized that, to a significant extent, Venn had less in common with Mill than with the “Kantian” or “even a Hegelian.”39

The first step in the mental process of “getting the world ready for the logician to set to work upon it” consisted in the construction of the logical world and of the logician.40 This world was “a state of things which in strictness does not exist.”41 What was needed to bring the logician into existence was the creation of a “purely speculative position,” an entirely “fictitious post” that “no living being can be spared to occupy”: “We [thus] have to assume a sort of representative mind, distinct from any of ours, but endowed with the same concepts (and of course laws of inference) as we at present possess ourselves. For such a mind as this is the ideal position of absolute non-interference with the objects before it, which is denied to any of us, could be rigidly preserved.”42 The first four assumptions were for logic to presuppose a world of distinct objects that were external to the individual, the same for all individuals, and completely free from disturbance by observation or reasoning. Venn believed that the first two assumptions were “true” insofar as they were the result of an historical, evolutionary process in which “the human race, as a whole” had created an orderly world out of chaotic fragments.43 It is, Venn argued, “still perpetually, though slowly, carrying it on at the present time.”44 The second and third assumption, which said that objects are the same for every individual and that individuals stand outside the world they observe and reason about, are deemed false. They nonetheless have to be accepted as “fictions” that make logic possible.45 From the subject-object duality—the fifth assumption—was said to follow the sixth assumption: that between true and false (and the need for tests or standards to distinguish between them). Because logic left to metaphysics the more fundamental question of the ultimate criterion of truth, Venn held that “different kinds of truth” were to be admitted, such as “formal conceivability,” “justification in experience,” and “appeal to authority.”46 One last, “absolutely necessary” yet also “obviously untrue,” condition for logic was that “we must assume that our words have the same determinate meaning in the minds of all who use them.”47 Read, in his review of Principles for Mind, recognized a major problem for Venn’s position at this point: some of the assumptions needed to establish logic seemed to make logic itself redundant. For example, in his chapter on definition, “Mr. Venn finds himself met by the doubt whether it can be of any use, since by the postulate [put forward in chapter 1] a complete consent exists as to the meaning of all words!”48

The general assumptions constituted an external world of objects “capable of being imbued with order, but not yet regarded as orderly.”49 The next step was to point to special objective assumptions of logic, derived largely from the natural sciences. These were to create a “cosmos” by means of “some kind of order, arrangement, or relation among the facts,” which Venn found in the uniformity of nature, exemplified by the law of causation and the existence of a large number of sequences and coexistences—ranging from natural substances, natural kinds, and social institutions to the principle of conservation of energy, statistical regularities, and rhythmic series (day and night, the seasons).50 Some of the reviewers observed that the list was both arbitrary and selective, as there was no reason why the principles of contradiction and of the excluded middle, for instance, had not been included. Unlike Mill, Venn made no attempt to prove the uniformity of nature. Instead, he accepted the law of causation and of coexistence as sufficient evidence that uniformity in nature could safely be assumed as the objective counterpart of the subjective act of inference.

Next came the subjective or mental assumptions, borrowed largely from psychology and metaphysics. Given that logic started from premises obtained from observation, directly or indirectly, the ordinary powers of observation had to be taken for granted. Here, Venn emphasized that observation did not furnish logic with a solid basis, with elementary data. Instead, logic’s starting point was “a merely conventional one, assumed for convenience”: everywhere and always “we seem to be in possession of data which are familiar to us. . . . This is our starting point.”51 The second subjective assumption was that of memory, needed to grasp the passage from premises to conclusion, and the third that of belief in the existence of uniformity of nature, without which neither inductive inference nor everyday conduct would be possible. Following Mill, Venn held that this belief arose gradually. But he denied that it was itself the result of a process of induction. Venn instead justified the belief in the uniformity of nature pragmatically, or naturalistically, with reference to the fact that it had always been acted on in everyday life, being humanity’s main survival strategy. As the reviewer in the Athenaeum captured the solution: “We act, and must act, from the first on supposed uniformities which, as our sphere of action becomes wider, and our powers of reflection on our acts more comprehensive, are themselves conceived in a larger way, till, in the scientific method, they attain the full breadth of the great generalization that nature as a whole is uniform.”52 The Hulsean Lectures of 1869 had contained the germs of Venn’s pragmatism: belief is a rule or habit of action. It was twenty years later, in Principles, that Venn brought it into contact with evolutionary thinking, as the American pragmatists would do too. A belief is not true because it represents reality, but because it offers humans rules or habits that allow them to act in such a way as to secure their survival—whether of their psychical selves or their mental outlook on the world—in the most effective way.

Inductive and Deductive Logic

On the basis of these foundations, Venn discussed traditional syllogistic logic, formal (algebraic) logic, and inductive logic. Given that he assumed the reader to be familiar with the rudiments of all branches of logic, Venn took the liberty to neglect certain topics and put emphasis on others. Principles was mainly devoted to induction, especially in its relation to deduction, though only some three or four of its twenty-five chapters explicitly dealt with this topic.

Venn gave a historical overview of different accounts of induction, from Aristotle through Bacon and Mill. According to Venn, the process of induction—as carried out by the scientist—always involved several steps. After “a stroke of insight or creative genius,” which was needed to find the property to be generalized and the class over which this was to be done, there followed the actual step of generalization by means of Mill’s four well-known methods.53 The third and final step was for the inductive generalization to be verified through observation, experiment, or deduction from known laws. By 1889, the Mill-Whewell debate of the 1840s–50s was still very much on Venn’s mind. His point was that it had not really been a debate: it arose solely from a failure to distinguish between the various steps and an underlying difference of opinion about their relative importance. Whewell, in his History and Philosophy, had focused almost exclusively on the first (“discoverer’s”) step, for which he introduced an entirely new vocabulary. Venn agreed with Mill that Whewell seemed to have reduced induction to making “happy guesses” and justifying these guesses.54 This common misunderstanding was one reason why Whewell’s books were “not much in vogue in the present day,” as Venn observed.55 Following a point already made in 1866 in The Logic of Chance, Venn argued that Mill, for his part, had failed to recognize that induction was not the same as generalization from observed particulars, as it always involved a creative act of the mind. Venn mentioned Jevons, who had revived the Mill-Whewell debate in the 1870s, as someone who limited induction to the third step, even arguing that induction was nothing more and nothing less than inverse deduction.56

Venn again rejected Jevons’s view of induction as a “great mistake,” but since it was in some sense related to induction proper, he did discuss the doctrine of inverse deduction in somewhat more detail.57 He repeated a criticism voiced in his 1879 review of Sigwart’s Logik, that Jevons’s doctrine was merely a restatement of what Venn took to be Whewell’s position, namely that “there are no rules for induction, as there are for deduction; that we must just hit upon hypotheses and test our deductions from them.”58 According to Venn, inverse deduction should be limited to solving logical puzzles, as it had no place in scientific inquiry—the point being that the creative work of the scientist cannot be reduced to mechanical labor: “say, Given that certain combinations of A, B, and C, are the only existent ones, find a solution in terms of A, B, C, and nothing else, from which this result shall follow, no complaint can be made. . . . But to make the same restriction when the problem is, . . . Given that a magnetic needle is deflected by an electric current, find a solution which shall introduce no fresh terms into the statement of the phenomena, would be a mere parody of physical investigation.”59 There is a fascinating historical connection between the De Morgan–Whewell exchange on inductive logic and that between Jevons and Venn. De Morgan had criticized Whewell for his use of “induction,” particularly his coupling of it with “logic,” to mean anything more than generalization of particulars. One of his main points was that if, as Whewell argued, there are no formal rules for the introduction of a new conception, involved in every scientific discovery, then it should not be called “logical.”60 Venn’s point against Jevons was interestingly different. Like De Morgan, Venn excluded the creative part from logic since it does not obey any rules. He did recognize that there is “a certain inverse element” in induction but argued that it is simply “far too small” to claim the name of induction for itself, seeing no reason why the old should be abandoned for this “new and narrow signification.”61 Venn, instead, defended Mill’s view of induction. The sobering message of his position was, however, that no inductive inference whatsoever could be justified or proven with Mill’s own methods. “This view,” W. E. Johnson wrote in Logic (1921), “seems to be held by many other logicians, though none of them, I think, put it as explicitly as Venn.”62 The upshot of Venn’s proposal that no knowledge gained by experience can be validly universalized indeed seems to be that no inductive inference is valid and that hence only deduction is guaranteed by logic. Venn’s mature defense of the spirit of Mill brought him remarkably close to the opposite camp.

The only other place where Venn explicitly distanced himself from Mill is in his view of the relation of induction to the syllogism. Throughout the 1870s, Venn had time and again defended the petitio principii charge against the syllogism. Indeed, in 1876 he had singled out this charge as standing at the very core of Mill’s entire logical system. Venn now took issue with it since it was exemplary of the overobjectification of logic. Mill had argued that someone who asserts that “All men are mortal” must know, or, if not, ought to know, that Socrates, being a man, is mortal. For the proposition, “Socrates is mortal,” is simply already presupposed in the general assumption, “All men are mortal.” Venn’s rejoinder against this argument was its neglect of the distinction between the objective facts and their subjective recognition: it failed to recognize that there is a difference—“for the purposes of Logic, all the difference required”—between the fact that “Socrates is mortal” is given with, or implied in, “All men are mortal” and knowing that “Socrates is mortal” given “All men are mortal.”63 According to Venn, it was crucial to make this distinction as it shows that there is, in fact, a “distinct mental step,” a “real step of reasoning,” involved in the process of getting from the premises to the conclusion, of ascertaining that certain statements are included in other statements.64 Mill’s failure to do so was largely due to the “simplicity and familiarity of the examples” he had chosen, discussing only the ordinary syllogism and neglecting mathematical reasoning and the complex arguments dealt with by algebraic logicians.

Venn also disagreed with Mill on the observational basis of the premises of the syllogism. He argued that there was no ultimate ground for them at all. It was perfectly acceptable to start from premises without going beyond them to see on which original data, say, the major premise was based. “We hold, and hold with confidence,” Venn wrote, “multitudes of propositions, for which we should find it impossible to assign facts in proof. . . . No general proposition can be a true ultimate starting point; but . . . such propositions are often the only starting point from which the thinker actually did set out, and often indeed the only ones from which he possibly could have set out.”65 Venn now rejected as psychologistic Mill’s idea that there are “ultimate sources of knowledge” that logic aims to discover; instead, logic should be able to start “at any moment from our present standing point” and to “account for the connection of our beliefs over this limited range.”66

The Scientific and the Practical Attitude

After the chapters on induction came an intermezzo of chapters on scientific method. These were followed by a number of miscellaneous chapters, which nonetheless shared a common theme that can be traced through Venn’s entire oeuvre, starting with his very first paper of 1862, and in his own life. It is that of the difference and tension between taking a logical-scientific or practical attitude toward the world: put differently, that of the relationship between science and everyday life, and between knowing and acting. Principles explored this theme—which would become a staple of American pragmatism—in many different ways and from many different perspectives, ranging from highly specific topics to the foundations of logic.

As he did back in 1862, Venn calls attention to the fact that in some fields of study, especially in the social and moral sciences, the acts of the scientist have an influence on the phenomena that are studied. Venn maintains that this is true in all fields. Even the astronomer, by moving to and from his instrument and by the movements of his hand in making his calculations, alters the position of every particular body in the universe. To take another example: in the penultimate chapter—“The Ideal of Logic and Methodology; or the degree and kind of knowledge at which Induction may legitimately aim”—Venn makes the claim that the final aim of all science is complete certainty, a “black and white sketch, in which everything is either accepted or rejected.”67 However, in working toward this possibly unattainable ideal, it was necessary to have “the shading put in.”68 What Venn hoped, in this regard, was for each individual to adopt the logical or scientific attitude in daily life and to speak in a language that made it possible for others “to know from [the] form of expression” whether the things he spoke of “were regarded by him as realities or not.”69 This call to put the criterion of existential commitment into practice touched on a prescient ideal, namely that of putting an end to the vagueness of common, everyday language.

The theme of the scientific and practical attitude also touched rather uncomfortably on the very core of Principles. Venn’s general view of logic was that, as a metascience, its basis is dualistic: it assumes that there is an independent world to be known and a mind to know it and brings these realms into an epistemic relation by means of objective and subjective conditions. What results is not only the logician’s world but also the figure of the logician as the neutral spectator who is viewing the world from nowhere, observing, recording, judging, and inferring. One major problem was that the logician (and, ipso facto, the scientist) was always also an agent in the world and that logic (and, ipso facto, science) always also stood in an active relation to that world.70 The crux of this problem was the feedback loop, so to speak, between knowledge and its application: as soon as knowledge is made publicly available and, subsequently, acted on, the facts under study might change, rendering conclusions or predictions false. Hence, though absolutely necessary, the disinterestedness of the scientific observer is impossible, firstly, since he is himself part of what he studies and, secondly, because his own behavior will also be influenced by what is known about it. The contemplative life of the scientist and the active life of the practical man, “intentionally or unintentionally, actually or hypothetically” overlapped.71 For example, in cases of “voluntary agency” (crimes, suicides, marriages), statisticians were inescapably “a portion of [their] own statistics.”72 An occasional intrusion into statistical tables would average out in the long run. But a problem arose when such deviations were extended “upon such a scale as to involve the destruction of the . . . scientific view and . . . to cause [a] great deal of practical fatalism.”73 For one last time, Venn returned to Buckle and the example of 250 persons who annually committed suicide in the 1850s. From the scientific point of view, all that could be established by this statistical regularity was that the “amount of the counteracting efforts and the strength of the antagonist motives remain the same.”74 Buckle, however, had used the statistical regularity to make the claim that the annual number of suicides were very likely to remain 250, from which he inferred the practical “inutility of efforts” and “inefficiency of motives.”75

Venn was worried about the tension between the scientific and practical attitude but also saw it as an opening of new avenues of knowing and living. “The more incisively we claim the passively inferential attitude of pure Science, the more distinct becomes the contrast, and yet the more intimate the connection, between this and the actively practical attitude of Art or Conduct.”76 Venn gave two examples of this connection. First, even though the task of logic is to reflect on science, since the objects with which it deals are often humans or things in which humans take an interest, it is impossible not to put logic into practice. “We cannot therefore propose to sit alone, on some lofty pinnacle, doing nothing else than inferring the past, judging the present, and forecasting the future.”77 It was perfectly legitimate, for instance, for someone to study such and such a science and then to act on this knowledge within his or her own sphere of action. Second, the present shape of the connection called for the creation of a new science:

It is when Science . . . claims for itself the right to observe and to judge and to infer human actions in precisely the same general way as if they were mere physical events, that dispute and confusion begin to arise. How indeed could this fail to be so, when each one of us thus becomes an almost involuntary and passive portion of the data of Science which lie about another man as observer, whilst he remains a centre of conscious voluntary activity in himself: whilst he is not only engaged in observing the similar materials grouped about him, but scheming to modify their course both for his own private ends and for those of Society as well?78

Venn invented the name Practic, in analogy to Logic, for this new science. (It was something he had been working on ever since the early 1870s, when he circulated a pamphlet on it in support of his candidacy for the Knightbridge Professorship at Cambridge.) What logic did for “Science”—to find the abstract elements common to all bodies of “generalizations about matters of fact”—practic was to do for “Art,” by which was understood bodies of “rules or directions for securing some end.”79 Austin’s rule utilitarianism, where right actions are those actions permitted by rules whose general acceptance brings about maximum well-being for all, inspired Venn to define practic as “an abstract theory of Rules of Action of which Ethics and Law should be sub-divisions.”80 It was to consist of the “pure Theory of Rules of Action, and of the processes of applying such rules in Conduct generally.”81 More specifically, what it could provide were the axiomata media—the general principles standing above empirical laws but below the foundations—needed for the application of sciences concerned with human action (political economy, jurisprudence, statistics, and sociology) and of the speculations of “socialists and reformers in general.”82 This is where Venn ended Principles: in the hope of the creation of a new science, one that would contain the sources for an answer to the question how scientific knowledge, including logic as the science of science, might inform rational behavior in a world lived from the logical or scientific attitude.

“Science and Common Thought” (1889)

Venn returned to the topic of the relation of science to everyday life in a lecture delivered at the newly established Caius House, Battersea, in October 1889, around the same time that Principles appeared (see figure 11.1). The lecture opened with a dismissal of the then widely held views on this relation—namely, that science does not or should not concern ordinary people or that it is wholly distinct from ordinary thought. Perhaps drawing on his own recent experience in the laboratory, Venn argued that science is not an activity that belongs to those “who can sit in chairs & read & write by the fire-side” and that has nothing to do with “working people.”83 Instead, science is what is common to everyone who takes up an epistemic relation to the world, whether scientific or not. “The good workman is already, whether he knows it or not, something of a “scientist,” Venn claimed, “as he has a measure of speculative science in his head & of practical science at his fingers’ ends.”84

11.1 Excerpt from Venn’s “Science and Common Thought” (1889). Unpublished lecture delivered at Caius House, Battersea, in October 1889. GCA, Venn Papers, D1. Reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

The first step in establishing this alternative view was to make clear what science is not, namely completely certain knowledge. Rather, paradoxically, the more scientists know about a subject, the greater the proportion of their ignorance about it. “There are an immense number of questions which I could not claim to be ignorant about, because I have not even reached the point of knowing what those questions mean, which some of the great leaders of science,—Thomson or Huxley, say—would frankly answer by saying, ‘I don’t know in the least.’”85 The next step was to replace the foundationalist view of scientific knowledge for a fallibilistic and coherentist outlook, whose inspiration Dewey, among others, would later credit to Peirce. “There is a common metaphor,” Venn wrote in a passage well worth quoting in full, “which seems to me misleading”:

People talk of the “circle of knowledge”, & say that as this circle increases, so will the circumference, which marks the dividing line of ignorance, increase too. This seems to suggest that within that circle the knowledge is tolerably complete. I think that a more appropriate metaphor would be that of a cobweb. You know how the spider begins. He stretches a few threads between remote points, & then proceeds to connect these by cross threads, & so to work the whole up into a consistent web. But however many of these connecting links he may make, it is still a web & not a surface; the gaps can never be really filled up so as to leave no blank spaces between.86

Venn believed that the common metaphor stood in the way of a clear view of what science is and how it is related to everyday life. According to Venn, science—like logic—grows out of, extends, and improves ordinary thinking, from which it differs not categorically but qualitatively, in terms of accuracy, generality, and rigor. It introduces “nothing new, nothing different; it is exactly the same thing, only more fully & accurately done.”87 All knowledge requires the relation of a subject to an object. Another precondition is that certain postulates are in place that turn the subject into a knowing subject and the world of objects into a knowable world. These postulates are not found in the human mind, nor are they grounded on, or fully justified on the basis of, observation. Instead, they take the shape of conventions that define what the subject must be in order to know and what the world must be in order to be knowable. In both the draft and the final version of the lecture, Venn heavily underlined the notion of the “Ladder of Science.” “Any workman who has to do such a trifling thing as hang a picture or fix a bracket has got his foot some rounds up on the ladder high up upon which are such men as Newton & Darwin.”88 It provides a key to Venn’s thinking: ordinary and scientific thought—like ordinary and symbolic language—exist on a continuum, albeit one that first needs to be constructed, so to speak, since to assume any epistemic position—whether scientific or nonscientific—means to abstract away from our living and acting in the world.

The Cambridge Legacy of Venn’s Philosophy

As in the case of The Logic of Chance and Symbolic Logic, the long-term impact of Venn’s Principles was assured by its inclusion on the list of recommended works for the Moral Sciences Tripos, resulting in a second edition in 1907. All three books would remain standard works in logic until the 1920s, exerting “considerable influence” on generations of students, both at Cambridge and, for example, in Montreal, Melbourne, and Calcutta.89 A “model of English philosophical writing,” Venn’s final addition to his logical trilogy placed him in the long Cambridge tradition of inductive logic, tracing, as C. D. Broad wrote in 1926, from “Bacon, Whewell and Venn in the past, [through] Mr. Johnson and Mr. Keynes in the present.”90 This mention of W. E. Johnson and J. Neville Keynes is important, because despite their criticism of their teacher’s work, they would be the ones to continue Venn’s legacy, partly through their own writings and partly through their teaching of C. D. Broad, R. B. Braithwaite, and G. E. Moore, among others. This once again underlines the need to include Venn in the local history of early analytic philosophy at Cambridge.

Venn showed keen awareness in the second edition of Principles that by 1907 Mill’s empiricism had gone entirely out of vogue in Cambridge. The first edition of 1889, Venn recalled, “throughout presupposed that Mill’s Logic was familiar to my hearers and that they had the work in their hands. Mill dominated the thought and study of intelligent students to an extent which many will find it hard to realize at the present day.”91 During the 1890s, the intellectual climate at Cambridge was one of disillusionment with British empiricism and an active interest in the German tradition of idealism.92 W. R. Sorley, George Stout and, especially, J. M. E. McTaggart—all moral sciences graduates in the 1880s and lecturers in the 1890s—were advocates of British Idealism, which briefly became the dominant outlook at Cambridge in the 1890s and first decade of the twentieth century. It was McTaggart, a student of Sidgwick and Ward, who persuaded G. E. Moore, Russell, and other students who came up to Cambridge as admirers of Mill that empiricism was “old-fashioned.”93 Russell’s teachers in philosophy were Sidgwick, Ward, and Stout. Given McTaggart’s influence, Russell regarded Sidgwick (“Old Sidg”) as a representative of the British point of view, which he believed himself to have seen through, so that Ward, a “Kantian” of sorts, and Stout, a “Hegelian,” played a more central role. Russell nowhere mentioned Venn, but it is very likely that he saw him too as one of the “fossils” of the moral sciences, the “last surviving representatives” of utilitarian-empiricism.94

Around the turn of the century, Moore and Russell rebelled against the idealism of their teachers, creating the basis for the emergence of the new “analytic” philosophy characteristic of twentieth-century Cambridge.95 Although this rebellion was timely and certainly regarded as an exciting departure, the standard narrative is problematic. One problem is that the doctrines of idealism were never directly “refuted” by Moore and Russell and that idealism continued to live on long after its “refutation,” in both a publishing and a teaching context.96 Another problem, specific to the local philosophical background at Cambridge, is that Moore and Russell broke with one tradition, but rehabilitated another, earlier one. Sidgwick’s criticism of the idealism of T. H. Green provided a springboard for some of the (not much) later arguments of Moore and Russell. Russell’s appeal to knowledge by acquaintance versus knowledge by description, for instance, can be traced back through Sidgwick to John Grote.97 Where McTaggart had made Russell a Hegelian, Moore made him return to the empiricist opinions that he had before he went to Cambridge. “Most of what I learnt at Cambridge had to be painfully unlearnt later,” Russell once noted, adding that he and Moore had not given Sidgwick “nearly as much respect as he deserved.”98 Next to Sidgwick, there was Venn, whose work on logic represented an undercurrent tradition, which continued steadily throughout the 1880s to the 1920s. The Logic of Chance initiated a long line of Cambridge contributions to logical probability, coming from his former pupil’s W. E. Johnson’s students J. M. Keynes, C. D. Broad, Dorothy Wrinch, and Frank Ramsey, of whom all except the first were at one point also students of Russell. Symbolic Logic, reviewed by, among others, W. E. Johnson in Mind, formed a critical point of departure in J. Neville Keynes’s Formal Logic (1884) and W. E. Johnson’s “The Logical Calculus” (1892), which was the “first statement of that ‘Cambridge philosophy’” that was to be associated with Moore and Russell.99 Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica changed the logical scene, but they did acknowledge debt to the Boole-Schröder tradition of which also Venn’s 1881 book was part.100 Principles remained a standard work at Cambridge for a number of decades. It belonged to that “living tradition of thought” to which J. M. Keynes referred to prevent younger men like R. B. Braithwaite and Ramsey from feeling like “isolated eccentrics.”101 The book was not influential, in the sense that it had followers, but references to it would appear in notable works from authors ranging from Bradley, Bosanquet, and Dewey to W. E. Johnson and C. D. Broad. W. E. Johnson’s three-volume Logic (1921–24), which C. D. Broad would present as a bridge between the “philosophical logic” of Mill and Venn and the “mathematical logic” of Whitehead and Russell, referred to Principles repeatedly.102 The work actually opened with a criticism of Venn’s Principles, arguing that its failure to see a connection between induction and probability was due to its neglect of the issue of the formal validity of inductive inferences. It is true that, like Principles, Logic was dated even at publication, but it would be unfair, given both the richness of his thought and the tradition he advanced, to simply dismiss W. E. Johnson as a “member of the British old guard” pushed aside by Whitehead and Russell.103 Together with J. M. Keynes’s Treatise on Probability (1921)—a work dedicated to Venn and “influenced by W. E. Johnson, G. E. Moore, and Bertrand Russell, that is to say by Cambridge”—Logic provided the stimulus for the Cambridge debate on induction and probability to which C. D. Broad, Wrinch, Ramsey, Harold Jeffreys, and Georg Henrik Von Wright contributed in the 1920s to 1950s.104 The frequency theory was unanimously problematized, but each of them followed Venn in taking probability to be a branch of logic rather than of mathematics. What the tradition of probabilistic logic “founded by the Cambridge logicians Keynes, Broad, and Johnson,” as Von Wright referred to it, did was to go beyond Venn and to combine two branches of inductive logic: induction by elimination (Bacon, Mill, and Venn), which grounded probability on induction, and induction by confirmation (Johnson, Keynes, and Broad), which based induction on probability.105 Broad, a former student of Johnson, Russell, and Moore, initially approached the relation between induction and probability in terms of natural kinds, thereby returning to a tradition that owed its very name to Venn. For example, in two early papers from 1918 and 1920, Broad argued in a manner reminiscent of Principles that inductive generalizations could be made only when “natural kinds of substances” (crows, swans, pieces of silver) were assumed to exist, as a “premise about the physical world.”106

There is another narrative that needs to be revisited when Venn’s long-neglected work is taken into account. It is that of the twin histories of pragmatism and early analytic philosophy, on both sides of the Atlantic. After a period of strong realism in the prewar years, Cambridge philosophers absorbed much of what is often called “America’s home-grown philosophy,” the pragmatism of Peirce and James, established at Cambridge, Massachusetts.107 It has been shown not only that pragmatists and analytic philosophers knew and respected each others’ works but also that there exists a direct line of influence from Peirce (and, to a far lesser extent, from James) to the post-Tractatus positions of Russell, Wittgenstein, and, especially, Ramsey. The pragmatist ideas coming from Cambridge, America, were discussed, modified, and rejected by these philosophers in Cambridge, England, all the while percolating slowly, and deeply, into their philosophical outlooks. One major underlying assumption of this narrative is that pragmatism originated wholesale in America and reached England as an imported good. What the case of Venn shows is that pragmatism already existed (in an admittedly rough form) at Cambridge well before the start of the twentieth century. It is in his work from the 1860s to 1880s, created independently of, and in part prior to Peirce and James, that some of the distinctive theses of pragmatism may arguably be found—first and foremost that any domain of inquiry, whether science, logic, or ethics, is human inquiry and that any account of knowledge and truth must start from that fact. Venn did not self-consciously identify as a pragmatist, of course, but his accounts of belief, knowledge, truth, and belief justify labeling his philosophical position as at least protopragmatist.

The significance of this point is not so much that Venn already roughly said what Peirce and James would say better and in more detail. Rather, its significance lies in the fact that it problematizes the idea of pragmatism as a uniquely American invention. As a way of thinking and as a style of philosophizing, it existed in Britain before the work of Peirce and James was imported across the ocean. There is a point to be made about the transatlantic community of discourse, considering, for example, Venn’s influence on Peirce and Dewey, with whom he shared many key interests, and Sidgwick’s direct influence on both James and Dewey.108 Some ten years before publishing his first papers on pragmatism, Peirce read Venn’s work. James, for his part, included a reference to the Hulsean Lectures in Principles of Psychology of 1890 and used The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic in his 1903–4 course on metaphysics at Harvard. Furthermore, Venn developed views that would have appealed to the Wittgenstein and Ramsey of the late 1920s. The following three ideas stand out, in this regard. Firstly, there is Venn’s proposal to identify the content of a belief by the actions that manifest it. Secondly, there is the argument that belief is in part a habit that pays off in action. And, lastly, there is the notion that, once put in place with reference to the fact, a belief is to be honestly evaluated by seeing whether it “works”—that is, whether it is a “‘good’ habit.” All these features of Venn’s philosophy would appear, in different, stronger, and more sophisticated terms, in Peirce and, many years later, in Ramsey, for instance in his “Truth and Probability.”

If pragmatism, in rough form, could have been found in England, even in Cambridge, why did Cambridge philosophers flirt with it only when it was imported from America? The obvious answer: timing. The late 1920s situation in Cambridge philosophy to which pragmatism was relevant was the result of at least three major events: the idealistic movement against British empiricism; the countermovement from which arose the analytic tradition; and, after the interruption caused by the First World War, the subsequent phase of mopping up the problems that Russell’s Principles of Mathematics, Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica, and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus left behind. For Russell, Wittgenstein, Ramsey, and several others at Cambridge who were thinking hard about logical and mathematical topics, Venn’s generation of philosophers would likely have appeared hopelessly outdated. Notwithstanding the striking theoretical similarities between Venn and Peirce, what seems to matter most, historically speaking, is that it was Peirce’s work that was attuned to the current problems when it freshly arrived on the Cambridge scene in the late 1920s.

The Logic of Chance, Symbolic Logic, and The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic placed Venn at the apogee of a line of thinking that, though sometimes prescient and not without influence, would soon fall into disrepute. It is one thing that Venn was forgotten. It is quite another, however, why and how he got forgotten.

A Final Attempt

One important factor in this process of scholarly forgetting is undoubtedly that Venn never managed to obtain a professorial chair. It was as painful to Venn as it was a source of surprise to others. “I knew, of course, that you were not a Professor,” wrote the American mathematician Robert P. Robertson in a letter to Venn, “but I took it for granted that some personal reasons prevented you from accepting such a post.”109 After failed attempts in 1866, 1872, and 1889, and despite his disenchantment with logic, he would give it one last try in 1896, when he was already in his midsixties and the idealistic tide had reached Cambridge. It was in that year that Sidgwick offered £200 from his own stipend to establish the Chair of Mental Philosophy and Logic, which had been provided for in 1881. Venn—having just received the offer of an honorary degree at Princeton University—put his name forward.110 Ward, his moral sciences colleague, who was then fifty-three years old, and Stout, aged thirty-seven, also submitted their names for election to the second, double-barreled chair in philosophy at Cambridge.111 During a walk, Ward had initially said that he would not stand against Venn on the understanding that the chair would soon become vacant again. He changed his mind and wrote a long and apologetic letter to Venn, dated 4 January 1897. Ward explained that if the electors were looking for a logician, they would no doubt choose Venn, but he had heard that they might instead prefer a specialist in psychology and metaphysics, which was his specialty. “I am quite aware, and everyone allows it,” Ward wrote to Venn, “that my claims in my department are not comparable with yours in logic. But if the contest is likely to be primarily among the psychology field, it really looks as if I ought to go in as I am strongly urged to do by many who have spoken and written to me about it.”112 The electors, who included J. B. Mayor and Sidgwick, chose Ward at the end of January 1897.113 Venn was so disappointed that he resigned in March the office of catechist and even talked of ceasing to reside in Cambridge. The initial disappointment may have been all the more bitter given that he had assumed from Ward’s letter that it had been Sidgwick who had encouraged his candidature—an assumption Ward, in yet another apologetic letter, from 13 March, hastened to correct:

My dear Venn,

Many thanks for your letter. It relieves my mind to one great point: I am glad to find that you do not blame me. But I confess I blame myself more or less: it seems to me I was too vacillating. I said definitely that I should not go in & allowed myself to be persuaded into giving in after circumstances.

You refer to Sidgwick’s communications with me just before the election. He certainly never urged me to go in on the ground that the decision would probably be between Stout and me. Stout in fact at that time was not a candidate & he too said that he did not mean to stand. . . .

It was not Sidgwick who told me that the electors were likely to “handicap” Logic, nor did he speak of the election to me at all till I asked him whether he thought that I was . . . to become a candidate after I said so definitely that I shd not be one. Speaking of you, I remember him saying: I know Venn well & I am satisfied that he will consider you perfectly free to change your mind. You had better write & tell him frankly how the situation now appears to you.

Sidgwick was extremely anxious to see you elected & believed that you would be. . . . It is, I am sure, a mistake to suppose that Sidgwick or Keynes regarded your standing—as you say,—as quite useless, or mine as more than a precautious quick contingency.114

Some three years later, in 1900, having already resigned his teaching post, there came an end to Venn’s active life as a logician, after he nearly died of pneumonia in a London hotel. When in 1907 Venn was asked to deliver a second edition of The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic, which was still in demand, logic had become his “old trade,” and he cared but little to bring it up to date: “Had I been still in active work I should of course have seriously considered the desirability of re-writing and re-casting the whole scheme. This is out of the question for one who has now for some years ceased either to lecture or to examine.”115 During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Venn would receive occasionally letters from scholars who admired his work, mostly from America, who often presumed he was still active in the field.116

“I know not what may be allotted to us in the way of any future work, & I am too tired to write more,” Venn would scribble in a letter to Sidgwick from June 1900: “I think I shall pull through: in fact, I feel pretty confident. I do trust the same for you too.”117 Sidgwick died two months later. Leslie Stephen would die in 1904. The old guard was passing away. Venn, however, stood on the verge of the second part of his life. There were still more than two decades ahead of him, in which he devoted himself tirelessly to biographical and historical research.

12

Biographer

(1891–1923)

During the 1880s, the same period in which he resigned Holy Orders and achieved national recognition of his academic achievements, Venn showed an increasing interest in history, not only of formal logic but also of his family, college, and university. From the 1890s onward, Venn began to experience that he was “enough of a Victorian” to share in one of the paradoxes laying at the heart of Victorian culture: an adoration of its own age and a fascination for its past.1 With a melancholic sense of the passing of time and a zealous wish to capture, tabulate, and even measure it, Venn came to devote himself more and more to antiquarian, biographical, and historical research. Almost until the day of his death in April 1923, he worked patiently and meticulously, together with his wife and son, on a dozen historical works—ranging from Admissions to Gonville and Caius College (1887) and Annals of a Clerical Family (1904) to the monumental Alumni Cantabrigienses (1922–54)—each drawn up as an expression of belonging and as a search for what it meant to be a Venn, a Caian, and a Cantabrigian.

Professional Gentleman

“Amongst various subjects which I convinced I was never meant to make a study of is history,” wrote Venn in the mid-1880s; “as a rule,” he added some twenty years later in a letter to a relative, it “gives prospects which only please those who are on the downward slopes of life. For myself I cared for nothing of the kind until I was past middle life.”2 Somewhere between the age of forty-nine and fifty-three, in what was perhaps the most productive and turbulent decade of his lifetime, Venn began to show an increasing interest in the history of his college and university. Around 1890, he joined the Cambridge Antiquarian Society and started to combine his roles as Cambridge don and gentleman of wide scientific interests, straddling the rather porous boundary between professional historian and amateur antiquarian: drawing on inherited genealogical interests, which entwined his historical, familial, and religious identities, as well as self-acquired scientific skills, academic communities, and informal networks, Venn would edit, compile, and write numerous historical books and volumes. Unlike his professional logical work, his publications in the area of college and university history arose from a combination of enthusiasm and a strong sense of duty. They were put together for people with whom he at some pointed shared a tie that was meaningful to himself, whether one of blood, of religious or historical interest, or of collegiate and university membership.

Venn’s pupils Maitland and Cunningham had graduated from the History Tripos, created in 1873. Venn himself had not been trained in historical study, never held an appointment in history, and did not refer to himself as a historian, preferring instead the term biographer or annalist. There was no need for him to try to make history his profession. The income from his senior fellowship, teaching, and examining made it possible for him to join the rank of Victorian gentlemen, a socially homogeneous, highly motivated, and largely self-taught intelligentsia, brought together by shared enthusiasms, common projects, and informal ties, sometimes forming “invisible colleges.”3 “An archaeologist or a man of letters who prefers to work as he pleases & when he pleases,” a member of the university characterized Venn in 1909: “being independent of pecuniary difficulties, he does not care to make ‘arrangements’ with other people, who wd demand as exact return of what he is about, & when he will finish.”4 At the same time, in terms of rigor and methodology, Venn perhaps had more in common with the professionalism of the research-based historians of the younger generation than with his contemporary Seeley, Regius Professor of Modern History. Seeley always felt that the study of history was too important to be left to gentlemen without professional motives but was himself driven more by pedagogical than by scientific imperatives.5 Venn was in a sense much like his cousin Leslie Stephen—the “integrated intellectual”—who brought professional standards to literary, or, in Venn’s case, antiquarian studies.6

Venn was not solely a professional logician or an amateur antiquarian and biographer or a Caian or a Cambridgian; he was all these. With his academic career now lying behind him, writing history became an expression of the sum of his life’s experiences and influences as much as the past itself turned into a central part of his present.

“A Monumental Work of Biographical Industry”: Venn’s University and College Histories

Venn’s first publication in the area of college and university history was an edition of the first Caius matriculation book, which he edited together with his wife, Susanna: Admissions to Gonville and Caius College in the University of Cambridge, March 1559–60 to Jan. 1878–9 (1887).7 It was in that same year that Venn persuaded George Forrest Browne, the Disney Professor of Archaeology, to approach the Cambridge Antiquarian Society (to which Venn would be elected a fellow in 1892) with the idea of publishing transcripts of Cambridge parish registers. The scheme was soon adopted, and Venn edited the register of St. Michael’s parish—within whose boundaries lay the whole of Caius College and the larger part of Trinity College—for the society in 1891.8 A year earlier, John and Susanna Venn put together, and printed for private circulation, a little volume on the Perse School, Cambridge—a foundation established in 1615 with an endowment from Stephen Perse, a fellow of Caius College, which provided six scholarships at his college to which Perse students were given preference.9 Venn’s association with the Cambridge Antiquarian Society continued into the twentieth century, when Venn edited The Annals of Gonville and Caius College by John Caius (1904) and one of the university grace books (Delta) (1910).10 His narrative works included the Caius contribution to the Robinson series “College Histories” in 1901; John Caius, Master of Gonville and Caius College (1910); a memoir of John Caius’s life in The Works of John Caius (1912); and some thirty contributions to the Caian, the college magazine founded in 1891.11 However, Venn placed himself “in the front rank of antiquaries” mainly with his biographical dictionaries—Biographical History of Gonville and Caius College (three volumes, 1897–1901) and, with his son John Archibald, Alumni Cantabrigienses (two volumes, 1922)—of which his other publications were in a sense by-products.12 Already in February 1887, in the preface to Admissions, Venn envisioned a “much ampler scheme” for a “sort of College Biographical dictionary,” which would serve as a reference work with “every ascertainable fact of interest about any of our former students.”13 Some twenty-five years later, in 1922–23, the Times would describe the Alumni Cantabrigienses as “a monumental work of biographical industry which, when completed will be a record without a parallel in any University.”14

From around 1886–87 until 1897, Venn tried to fit in his research for Biographical History around teaching and family commitments; around publication of the third edition of The Logic of Chance (1888), The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic (1889), a new edition of Symbolic Logic (1894); around preparation of “Theory of Statistics” (1891); and around collaborative work with Galton on anthropometry. Many of his nonlecturing days in Cambridge were spent in the College Treasury and Library or in the University Library and Registry; vacations were filled with visits to the Public Record Office and the British Museum as well as with pilgrimages around diocesan registries in the countryside, which Venn described with dry humor in letters to Henry J. Hunter, an antiquarian friend: “Lincoln is, as episcopal registries go, quite at the top. The secretary gives me the key & I sit up amongst the records in Bp Alnwick’s tower with the doves cooing about me & the records mouldering on the floor.”15 The three volumes of Biographical History, complete with introduction and index, amounted to sixteen hundred pages, containing a record of every student known to be admitted to Gonville Hall or Caius College since 1348, together with a record of their degree(s) and a summary of the major events in their career, as well as detailed accounts of its successive masters, fellowships, endowments, scholarships, prizes, buildings, pictures, and plates. An impressive demonstration of mastery of both college and university sources and a huge amount of college admission registers, biographical reference works, episcopal and public records, and manuscript collections—all regimented into neat, structured pages—the publication in 1897, 1898, and 1901 represented over a decade of meticulous research.

Venn’s next major undertaking, Alumni Cantabrigienses, was nominally the project of his son. When, in 1907, the Council of the Senate agreed to a request from John Willis Clark, the registrary, to ask Cambridge University Press to agree to the publication of a volume entitled Matriculations and Degrees, John Archibald Venn, who had taken honors in the History Tripos in 1904–5, was named as the candidate to undertake the work.16 There were signs that he got the job thanks to his father’s involvement. Around 1905–6, when John Archibald Venn was planning to get married to Lucy Marion Ridgeway, his father and his prospective father-in-law—William Ridgeway, fellow of Caius College (1880) and successor of Browne as Disney Professor of Archaeology (1892–1926)—looked for suitable employment for him. “My real objection to their getting married too soon,” wrote Ridgeway to Venn upon receiving the marriage proposal in September 1905, “is that [a] young man of Archie’s energies should have some serious employment as soon as possible.”17 After posts as an assistant to John Willis Clark in the Engineering Department had come to naught and as his son developed “a taste, rather oddly, in the antiquarian direction,” Venn decided to gently assert his influence; he contacted Clark—who was indebted to him as he had recently furnished a list of Caius alumni as potential contacts for a library fund—and may even have been the anonymous donor of the honorarium from which John Archibald Venn’s work on Matriculations and Degrees was paid.18 “Archie is . . . beginning upon University records in the shape of the early matriculations, &c.,” wrote Venn in a letter to Laura Forster of 25 December 1906: “If he goes on, I hope it may lead eventually to some opening at the University Registry.”19 Although the agreement with the University Press was made with John Archibald Venn, who worked hard on the records of admission and graduation, in the period between 1907–8 and 1913 his father spent the bulk of his time on the project, going through the university records of governance. Alumni Cantabrigienses, which took on the main characteristics of Biographical History, was very much a family undertaking.

Where Susanna Venn was “plodding away with the cards; sorting them out into A, B, C, &c, &c, with the assistant ‘Miss Bullock’ often suffering from ‘typisto’ cramp,” Venn, in his mid-eighties, found his time at Vicarsbrook “fully & pleasantly occupied”: “What with the garden outside, when the weather is decent; & with the Alumni Cantab. inside when the weather is bad; I really don’t want to move. The advantage of the . . . job is, that, though it had a beginning, it clearly has no end—at any rate for me. . . . The Press made an agreement with Archie. . . . This was before the War; & now I am at work on it, whilst he does bigger & better things.”20 The Alumni Cantabrigienses was an immense project, with the first part alone containing nearly eighty thousand names. Venn wrote in 1921 that, at the start, no one had realized the magnitude of the task. He estimated that he had worked for over twelve thousand hours on the production of the first two volumes.21 “It is difficult for anyone, who has not seen the work in its making, to realise,” wrote H. P. Stokes, one of Venn’s helpers, about the “archaeological achievements” of the Alumni Cantabrigienses: “the immense amount of research involved in this great undertaking. Take, for instance, one section of the inquiries . . . that of the Clergy. In most dioceses, Dr Venn ransacked the Bishop’s Registers and Act Books, the volumes of “subscriptions for orders”; the Episcopal Visitations; the Books of Institutions and of First Fruits and the Record Office. From such details let the reader judge his methods of inquiry and research!”22 With support from the syndics of the University Press, the younger Venn continued the Alumni Cantabrigienses, a work that “occupied him for the rest of his life”: he saw the two remaining volumes of part 1 through the press (in 1924 and 1927), and (from 1940 to 1954) the six volumes making up part 2.23

The Venns’ endeavors were part of and benefitted from paradoxes that lay at the heart of Victorian culture: an adoration of its own age and a fascination for its past as well as an embrace of work as the bedrock of progress and improvement and an upsurge of free time and leisurely pursuits.24 At Cambridge, there was a willingness to support the publication of historical records. The university published lists of graduates, the Historical Register (1910), and the Index to Tripos lists. And in addition to supporting the Alumni Cantabrigienses, the University Press took over from the Antiquarian Society the responsibility for the publication of the final two volumes of grace books.25 Before the publication of Alumni Cantabrigienses, Joseph Foster, editor of Alumni Oxonienses (1891–92), performed preliminary work toward a companion volume for Cambridge, and C. M. Neale issued An Honors Register from the Year 1246 (1900), The Senior Wranglers of the University of Cambridge (1907), and The Early Honors Lists of the University of Cambridge (1909). Next to such official sources, Venn could draw on key records published and made accessible by the records movement of the early nineteenth century as well as on work already done by others, from collections of manuscripts brought together by generations of antiquarians, to indexes and editions published by historically minded clubs and groups of gentlemen that popped up like mushrooms—ranging from the Cambridge Antiquarian Society and the Society of Antiquaries of London to the Clifton Antiquarian Club and the Bath Natural History and Antiquarian Field Club—and the new genre of professional directories.26 And then there was also Venn’s own far-flung network of contacts, some of whom were the product of long-term acquaintances, while others were completely casual; sympathetic Cambridge colleagues, fellow Caians, people contacting Caius in search of information, and other antiquarians, at home, across the country, and abroad, whom he knew either personally or through correspondence, were enlisted to help while making Biographical History and Alumni Cantabrigienses. Venn himself called on Caians for aid, at home and abroad, likening such services to that of the benefactors of the college, who had endowed the buildings and fellowships:

Much help can be furnished . . . from private genealogies and family notes. I hope I may appeal for help of this latter kind to some of the many and keen genealogists and antiquarians in the United States; for a college which was so strongly represented as ours was, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the Eastern Counties, cannot fail to be linked to many a New England family pedigree.

Some years ago, I printed in The Caian a list of names of those former students as to whose subsequent career nothing, or next to nothing, had been discovered. Thanks to the kindness of various correspondents, a number of these gaps have been filled up. . . . Will readers of The Caian look through the [new] list and see if they can help with suggestions as to any of the names contained therein?27

With Dr., FRS, and, since 1892, FSA attached to his name, Venn was an insider in the intersecting and mutually reinforcing networks of professional historians and gentleman antiquarians in and around Cambridge. He could call on the registrary and architectural historian, John Willis Clark, with whom he served as coeditor of the proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society to clarify points of architectural history. Frederic W. Maitland, his former pupil, who was among those who commissioned Venn to edit Grace Book Delta, helped with points of mediaeval law. Because he allowed the master of Jesus College and Augustus Austen-Leigh of King’s College to use his card index of names to compile their own college lists, Venn, in turn, was provided with access to unpublished research on their colleges.28 Unlike, for example, the London-based antiquary William J. Harvey, whose proposal for a college-specific Alumni Cantabrigienses (1443–1893) came to nothing largely because of his outsider status, Venn was one of the Cambridge men “talking and writing about their own Colleges and University.”29

Each of Venn’s historical books, and especially the two major ones, relied on “very numerous and various sources”: card sorters, secretaries, typists, and proofreaders, from Mr. J. Gardner Bartlett of Boston, Massachusetts, who supplied the biographies of more than one hundred Cambridge students who emigrated to New England before 1650, to “the Reverend boy Frank,” a newly married curate, who wrote in 1915 that “he should be to make a trifle if any work could be found for him” and who was sent off at once to the British Museum Reading Room with a box of cards to check.30 “I have received kind help,” wrote Venn in one of his college books, “from [so many] sources, that I fear my only means of showing impartiality in my very sincerely felt gratitude, is to mention no names at all, but to beg each into whose hands these pages may fall, to take such share of my thanks as is due to him; and to add to the occasion of it by further help.”31

A few months before to the publication of Alumni Cantabrigienses, a typed copy was distributed among antiquarian friends—such as Frank Johnson at Great Yarmouth and Walter Rye at Norfolk—before being sent to the press: “I have now received back all 4 D vols from the home correspondents & two of them from the Eastern circuit. Nothing has yet come from the Western circuit, i.e., the one which ends with Beavan. I wonder if he has got them all four in his study, & is chuckling over the omission on the part of his predecessors to spot blunders.”32 Venn’s approach to compilation—drawing on a sea of sources and a web of contacts—was arguably both the strength and the weakness of his two major works. Although he covered more ground than others, Venn was aware that his work was not perfect. Until 1921–22, “up to the age of 88,” reminisced J. N. Keynes, “Dr Venn came very frequently to the Registry to . . . verify his material.”33 In a remarkable passage in the Early Collegiate Life (1913), well-worth quoting in full, Venn told of the college biographer’s nightmare, where nine thousand of the men—Irish archbishops, Benedictine monks, priests from Douay and Rheims, Elizabethan gentlemen—whose biographies he had uncovered appeared to him in a dream:

One complained that he had held a rectory, and “that fellow had put him down as a vicar”; another had preached a sermon [and] no notice taken of it. . . . There were squires who had been called yeomen, yeomen who had been called farmers. . . . I saw the gold-headed end of a cane violently shaken, and from beneath came a voice complaining that the holder had been F.R.C.P.; and that instead of an “F” he was insulted with a scurvy “M.” One pointed to a portrait on the wall, with a name attached; “They dare to call that me”. Some remarked that, though there was a monument to attest the fact, no notice of death was recorded. Another, in a threatening tone, asserted that years before his death he had been foully killed by his biographer. Many of them had been studying some authority which they called “D.N.B.”; but their complaints were not so much directed at the blunders which they said they found there, as against a certain delinquent who “ought to have prevented such mistakes.”

. . . I suddenly reckoned up their number. . . . Hardly had I done so when there came, from far and near, a simultaneous yell: “That’s the man, there he is!” Then the truth flashed on my mind. They were the men whose lives I had written, and I awoke with a scream.34

One letter of 1911 was annotated by Venn, “Killed inadvertently by me,” to which the corpse in question responded: “It seems to me if there is any apology it is due from me for having, though unwittingly, falsified any official history.”35 Frank Johnson apologized for errors he had failed to spot; and inaccuracies were found in the work of Walter Rye, the Norfolk antiquarian. Venn’s hard work, combined with his inability to do anything sloppy, could not prevent omissions and mistakes from appearing in Biographical History and Alumni Cantabrigienses. For pre-1500 matriculations, the Alumni Cantabrigienses would in time be superseded by A. B. Emden’s Biographical Register of the University of Cambridge to 1500 (1963), but it would nonetheless be reprinted twice in facsimile and integrated into the Cambridge Alumni Database.36

Cambridge, a Microcosm of the Nation: Venn’s Historical Methodology

Venn’s biographical histories stood out not only for their sheer comprehensiveness, but, when compared to the Alumni Oxonienses, also for their structure—with the thousands and thousands of prosopographies arranged in neatly ordered, closely printed rows. Next to the use of a wide range of sources and contacts, the historical research for Biographical History and Alumni Cantabrigienses was informed by techniques learned from the statistical and anthropometrical work undertaken with Galton in the 1880s and 1890s: to compile, document, classify, and tabulate on cards as completely and carefully as possible the information about each person (age, date and place of birth, previous education, social position of parents, occupation, notable accomplishments, etc.) such that the data could be used to observe patterns and facilitate generalizations and hypotheses. In 1895–96, when Venn embarked on work for Biographical History, he recognized that the ground for a conventional history of Caius College had already been covered but noted that a biographical history,

in the shape of a complete and descriptive Administrative List, is a comparatively new field; and such an attempt to give a continuous presentment of the life, and social and intellectual outcome of our ancient house, seemed worth following out. . . . Besides the link of personal and local attachment, therefore, such a work as is here proposed cannot but offer much interest to every student of the successive phases of the religious, intellectual, and social development of our country.37

Much like the anthropometric measurements of Cambridge students, the biographical information about alumni of Caius College provided batches of statistical data to be used as a basis for both historical and social research.38 The general introduction to Biographical History suggested that, aside from the pursuit of family history, its lists also allowed for the use of statistical analysis to examine the comparative social status, geographical origin, and careers of the students. For example, in the case of the social composition of Caius,

a careful appeal to statistics tends, I think, to throw much doubt upon one very prevalent assumption. It is still supposed by many persons, and used to be confidently asserted at the time of the discussions which led to the first Commission for University Reform, that both Cambridge and Oxford had widely departed from their original design . . . ; and that from being teaching places for the poor they had been diverted into idling places for the rich. . . . So far as statistics can be appealed to, they certainly seem to establish the fact that the Universities have been fed from the same classes of society during the last three or four centuries; and that if the wealthy upper middle class preponderates now, the fact is due not to this class supplying larger relative numbers, but to the great proportional growth of this class itself.39

Again, much like the homogeneity of the Cambridge measurements had provided an opportunity to determine “the correlation between intellectual and physical capacities,” as a microcosm of the nation, Caius College showed in miniature the impact of larger events developments and changes: “the numbers of cases with which we are concerned, though dealing only with a single college, are still sufficiently large to claim the steadiness and generality which may be called statistical, and therefore to furnish a tolerably fair sample of what was going on throughout the country.”40 Venn was interested in the clues provided as to the causes of the “continuity and variety of national life” suggested by college statistics, reasoning that if a certain observed fact was connected with certain “determining elements,” these were likely to have produced the recorded facts.41 For example, the “difficulties of travel in early times,” before the era of railways, were said to account for the fact that, as between the two universities, “local proximity was [once] the main determining element, the Eastern Counties gravitating to Cambridge and the Southern and Western to Oxford; whilst the Northern were divided between the two.”42 A similar line of reasoning was evident in John Archibald Venn’s 1908 statistical graphs of Oxford and Cambridge matriculations since 1544, which attempted to establish a link between admissions to the university and the impact of such external events as wars and religious disturbances.43

Venn’s method and approach contrasted sharply with that of Leslie Stephen in his compilation, from 1882 onward, of another intellectual monument of Victorian Britain, the Dictionary of National Biography. Stephen too had embarked on an enormous endeavor in compilation, bringing together no fewer than 29,120 lives—of which Venn described those of members of the Venn family and of Caius as well as that of Boole, and John Archibald Venn that of his own father.44 Both Venn and Leslie Stephen were concerned to honor the achievements of the notable deceased, and both understood that biography could make a moral impression and have a positive effect on the reader, through the presentation of the life of men (and women) of “strong and noble character.”45 But whereas Leslie Stephen wanted to assemble those facts that, when presented in a suitable literary style, contributed to a sense of the greatness of the “leading names in [British] history,” Venn was more interested in the classifiable information about each and every graduate—the “respectable” man as well as the man of “uncertain habits” and “picturesque career.”46 When Venn did speak of “celebrities of the College” that were of “D.N.B. standard,” it was either to commemorate or, more often, to refer to a statistical sample of a larger community whose chance of occurrence he wished to determine.47 “I said to Mrs. [Henrietta] Litchfield, on your authority,” wrote Dicey to Venn in January 1912, “that your examination into the careers of Cambridge M.A.’s led you to the conclusion that if you get a body—of course, I suppose a chance one—of Cambridge undergraduates (or M.A.’s?) before you, you might expect that 4 or 5 per cent thereof would rise to the D.N.B. standard, i.e., of being mentioned in a future ed., of the D.N.B.?”48 Since he was trying to satisfy a number of different audiences—Caians, Cambridge men, antiquarians, social scientists, and historians—Venn took care to adapt his work to their interests. For instance, pen portraits of individuals and colorful tales of prominent and forgotten college characters were provided alongside abstracted biographical data and chronological facts. However, beneath this rhetorical variety stood an analytic approach to history, informed by methods and techniques that Venn advocated as a professional logician and amateur in the fields of statistics and anthropometry.

Domestic Biographer

Venn’s studies of Cambridge and Caius College were only in part the history of facts and numbers. They were also, like Annals of a Clerical Family (1904), the history of a succession of people—one in which he was personally involved. Venn himself became part of the history of Caius and vice versa. This was illustrated when his own memories were included in Early Collegiate Life (1913) and Biographical History and when his portrait was placed in the College Hall both as a compliment for his three-volume magnum opus and as a memento for “our successors [such that] they may know what you looked like as one of its most distinguished Fellows & its Historian” (see figure 12.1).49

12.1 Portrait of Venn, aged sixty-five, 1899. By Charles E. Brock. Reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

All of Venn’s historical work was grounded on and steeped in an awareness of a basic discontinuity. Venn had moved away from the Evangelical and clerical traditions by which he defined his family; and he had participated in the reform of the ancient institutions of his college and university, which he himself chronicled in great detail. At the same time, a fundamental sense of the unbroken and, to his mind, unbreakable historical continuity of collegiate and familial identity, membership, and community ran through each of his narratives. Venn, in fact, wrote the histories of his college and his family not merely as a “professional antiquarian” but also very much as a “domestic biographer,” one whose storytelling resembled a Venn family tradition of life writing and who, thereby, continued a religious literary form that went back to the Clapham days.50 The acceptance of a Broad Churchmanship and the resignation of Holy Orders had broken two strands of continuity. But, deeply penetrated with the feeling of old connections being lost and of a “tie of gratitude to the past” that brought with it an “obligation to the future,” Venn, in tracing through successive generations of Venns and Caians, choose to reinforce the remaining strands of academic connection and corporate values.51

Rather than simply an application of the approach and values of domestic biography to that of collegiate genealogy, however, there existed a two-way relation between the main areas of Venn’s historical writing. Both his autobiography (written in 1887, revised in 1902, and corrected in 1917) and his family history took the title Annals, a term with which Venn was familiar from Caius, where the college annals were among the record-keeping activities established in the sixteenth century by John Caius, himself a “keen antiquary and historian.”52 When around 1900 Venn started work for Annals of a Clerical Family, he invoked yet another college ritual by referring to the new book in a letter to an antiquarian friend, Henry J. Hunter, as his “private Commemoration Service.”53

Domestic Biography

Venn began to care for family history in the mid-1880s, when those from whose memories he could have drawn, like his aunt Emelia’s, died and when a new generation of Venns arrived with the birth of his own son.54 There was much for Venn to puzzle out for himself, but he was fortunate enough to be heir to a family tradition of domestic biography and genealogical activity, which he eventually decided to uphold and continue. Venn inherited a vast archive of diaries, autobiographical notes, correspondence, and papers, dating back to the eighteenth century. He added some of his own letters and the autobiographies of himself and his wife, Susanna, with the intention of passing everything on to their son.55 All documents in the Venn archive, such as those belonging to the Parentalia, had been preserved as testimonies of self-examination aimed to foster in members of the family a corporate ethos and pride in the religious examples set by the lives of their ancestors. Like others in his generation of Clapham descendants, such as Fitzjames Stephen, Venn identified with the family’s biographical tradition even though he had departed from the Evangelical beliefs that had been their original justification. When he wrote “Annals: Autobiographical Sketch,” he tellingly opened with a reference back to his father’s and grand-father’s habits of self-documentation, adding:

As to myself, I never at any time attempted to note down the events of the passing day. And now, in late life, wishing to leave some record which shall give information to those who come after me, I find that the only contemporary records consist in letters, account books, pocket Diaries, etc. I have however a good memory for past events, so far as I am personally concerned, and with the help of such records as those just mentioned, composed by my father and myself, I have now put [a] brief narrative . . . together.56

Venn was also heir to a tradition of genealogical activity. “To my grandfather, John Venn,” Venn remarked in Annals of a Clerical Family, “we owe a large part of our family reminiscences”: “He was the first of our line to take any interest in genealogical inquiries. The Parentalia were begun by him, and carried down to his father’s time; and without his industry, and his care in noting what he heard and remembered, many early facts would have been hopelessly lost.”57 Parentalia was completed and printed by John Venn of Clapham’s son, Venn’s father, Henry Venn of CMS, who himself at one point also researched the family’s clerical succession.58 Venn’s father and grandfather had both sought to add a public dimension to the family’s biographical tradition by publishing “lives” that were to function as Christian exemplars to others outside the family. John Venn of Clapham began and wrote the biographical memoir for Life and Letters of Henry Venn of Huddersfield, completed in 1834 by Henry Venn of CMS as The Life and a Selection from the Letters of the Late Rev. Henry Venn.59 Venn contributed to this genealogical tradition by writing part of the biographical memoir of his father in The Missionary Secretariat of Henry Venn (1880), DNB articles on four members of his family, Annals of a Clerical Family (1904), and a chapter with memories of his experience of Caius as an undergraduate in Early Collegiate Life (1913). Venn’s collaboration, successively, with his brother, wife, and son added a new public dimension to the inherited pursuit of historical output—as a partly familial and partly academic activity.

Venn again departed from family tradition as well. When Henry Venn of CMS died in 1873, it was assumed that like his father and grandfather before him, Venn would interest himself in family biography and contribute to another “life of a saint.” Within three weeks of his brother’s death, John Venn of Hereford wrote Charles Clayton at Caius that he and his nephew would be writing a biography.60 The preparation of “Memoir of Henry Venn” (1880) was “naturally undertaken in the first instance by Mr. Venn’s own family,” but owing to “many hindrances, of little concern to the public,” the book appeared with only a chapter by Venn and his younger brother Henry, and the remainder by a CMS colleague of their father’s.61 Given the strong assumption of familial prerogative in biography, it was felt necessary to explain this fact in the apologetic preface by drawing a distinction between domestic and public intimacy. The part about Henry Venn’s private life was produced by his sons, who asked William Knight, his “confidential coadjutor,” to describe their father’s working life at the CMS.62

Venn drew on family tradition in his own “Annals,” where he used the literary form of spiritual autobiography and the rhetorical devices of self-examination and honesty. What distinguished his position from that of the three previous generations of Venns, of course, was the loss of the Evangelical perspective that had inspired their writings. Rather than rejoice the conversion to Evangelicalism, Venn’s “unconversion” narrative described the collapse of Evangelical beliefs without being able to fully replace them by others. Where John Venn of Clapham and Henry Venn of CMS had each written from a “double perspective” of an earthly life and a heavenly life, Venn tried to explain himself in such this-worldly terms as the conflict between feelings and intellect, father and son, the self and others, and so on.63 At the same time, by circulating his unpublished “Annals” to be read by his brother, wife, son, and second cousin Dicey, Venn remained committed to the idea of a domestic archive—from which Susanna Venn slightly departed when she addressed her own autobiography solely “to her two,” John and Archibald Venn.64

Around the year 1900, Venn continued the genealogical work already done by his grandfather by preparing a small private edition on family history, written for a small audience of known blood connections.65 Some two years later, the project had expanded into a “big book,” and the search for a larger audience had become somewhat of a personal goal in and for itself:

I want my boy to know who are his cousins in the world. I think I know who are my 2nd cousins, but who are his 3nd cousins is a step into the desert. Can you supply this? . . . What I want of course, are the descendants of Henry Thornton, & Mary Anne Sykes. Who are their children & grandchildren I fairly know . . . ; but there my knowledge stops. Is your nephew Morgan to whom you referred one of these last? If so, he is a case in point; & if in Cambridge, Archie (now at Trinity) ought to make his acquaintance.66

The resulting book, Annals of a Clerical Family, which described the origin, early history, and lives of several generations of Venns, complete with an appendix with accounts of families related by marriage, such as the Gays, Ashtons, Kings, and Sykeses, bore a dedication: “In pious memory of devout and worthy ancestors these pages have been gratefully compiled. ‘A good life hath but few days, but a good name endureth for ever.’” John and his brother, Henry Venn, who supplied part of the chapter on their father, acted on their inherited duty to perpetuate the reputation of their family name; they paid for the creation of a monument in the parish where William and Richard Venn preached, respectively, from 1600 to 1621, and from 1625 to 1645, and looked to circulate copies of the family Annals: “I agree with you about giving away plenty of the Venn annals. I always looked upon it in the same way as the monument at Otterton—a duty we owed to those who have gone before us & whose name we share.”67 While on a tour from New York to Washington, DC, in 1906, Henry Venn found that the Venn name was well known in the United States. At a clergy meeting in Baltimore, he was asked, “Which of your family wrote The Duty of Man? Was it your father who was the sec. of C.M.S.?”; and at a Divinity Seminary outside Washington, DC, he was thanked for a CMS grant received in 1813.68 “These things struck me strangely 3000 miles from home,” he wrote to his brother in Cambridge, adding: “I will [give] a few names, on another slip, of persons whom I should like you to tell Macmillan to send copies from you & me.”69

Venn’s Annals of a Clerical Family followed the writings of his father and grandfather before him perhaps especially in projecting certain family values across generations. One recurrent theme was the ways in which the Venns had left their traces in each of the traditions that molded them: the Evangelical, the clerical, and the Cantabrigian. None of the Venns had “held any of the higher offices in the Church” or “emerged into public history”; instead they were “clergymen of the Church of England, in an uninterrupted line, from the period of the Reformation,” distinguished not by worldly fame, but solely by their “steady application to the duties of their office” and content with the “reward of honest and unselfish service.”70 Venn explicitly chose to construct the family Annals around the nine generations of clerical succession, laying much emphasis on their “hard” and “vigorous” work, and the theological continuity of the three generations of Evangelical succession; the academic or business careers of any surviving brothers being glossed over so that the main narrative could run directly from William Venn to Henry Venn of CMS and John Venn of Hereford.71

Venn’s challenge in writing Annals of a Clerical Family was to mediate between pride in the Venns’ continuous achievement and his own departure from the Evangelical and clerical traditions. Venn avoided the question of the discontinuity in his own lifetime by drawing Annals to a close in the preceding, deceased, generation of his father and uncle—although, following his own editorial pattern, the line could have been continued through to his brother, Henry Venn of Walmer, and his nephew, Arthur Dennis Venn.72 Another departure from the norms of his family’s biographical tradition was that in his narrative Venn did not enter into the details of spiritual change or particular Evangelical doctrine. Instead, he wrote in a rather down-to-earth tone, focusing on the Venns as a corporate body tied together by locality, coat of arms, wills, and possessions like gold watches and telescopes passed on from generation to generation. For example, in the passage about Henry Venn of Yelling’s conversion to Evangelicalism, Venn referred the reader to John Venn of Clapham’s memoir: “The change is very fully described by my grandfather; and well and wisely so; for he was profoundly convinced of the all-importance of the principles thus acquired.”73 And in describing the ties binding the Clapham Sect, he wrote: “No doubt they accepted in the main the body of doctrines known as Evangelical. . . . But the real bond of union amongst them . . . was rather to be sought in their deeds of active charity than in their speculative opinions.”74 Perhaps under the influence of Galton, who read the proofs of the family Annals and who included the Venns in his Noteworthy Families (1906), Venn at several points found family connection also in certain inherited physical or mental traits—ranging from “hereditary brilliancy” to “inherited eccentricity.”75

However far he may have drifted from his family’s Evangelical beliefs, through his Annals of a Clerical Family and articles on members of his family for the DNB, Venn still fulfilled not only a duty but also a moral role in his family network. As Laura Forster wrote to Venn in 1907: “I have also long thought that for the rising generation some kindling of a worship of ancestry was the best way of opening their minds to the unseen. I do not ever worship in its conventional form, but the giving of full worth to past lives, & the realisation of their survival in us—which means also a continuity in the life of the spirit. Of this part of religion you are a high priest.”76 During old age, as he placed his life experiences in the context of a historical and evolutionary process, Venn came to understand himself more and more in terms of family membership and hereditary influences. He not only self-consciously identified with the long traditions of domestic biography and genealogical activity but also blamed William Venn of Otterton for his own “obstinate disposition” to address the College Chapel.77 At the same time, while his respect for the past grew steadily, the belief that future generations would care for (auto)biographies eroded.78 When Henry Venn of Walmer recorded his reminiscences, which he circulated among his immediate family members, he wrote to his brother: “I am wondering if the next generation & the one below it will much care for our memories. . . . I had thought of printing it for private distribution but I am doubtful if it is worth the expense. Louie [his wife, Louisa J. W. Ramsay] does not think the grandchildren will appreciate it.”79 Venn blamed the lack of appreciation for family history on a general decline of “religious feeling” and “prophets” among the younger population—one that not only made the Evangelicalism of the Claphamites incomprehensible, but also destroyed the ability to learn from the lives of those whose teachings were believed to be outdated.80

Collegiate Genealogy

There was much overlap between Venn’s works on his family and those on the university and, especially, on Caius. In amassing biographical details about successive generations of Caians for Biographical History, Venn pursued a variant of domestic biography, reinforcing a collegiate rather than a familial identity.81 Venn continued the record-keeping and annalist tradition of the college, traceable to the sixteenth century. He insisted on a close connection between the author and the subject, in this case an institution, whose life was written, and he addressed a gathering of descendants of Edmund Gonville and John Caius who shared a common past, rituals, sobriquets, and heraldry. Above all else, just as the creation of literary and physical monuments to the Venns was a duty of bearers of that name, according to Venn, Caians owed to founders and benefactors of the college the duty of commemoration and stewardship. Venn, in his address following the “Royal Toast” at the “Celebration of the Five Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Foundation of the College” in 1898, reminded all those present that “each succeeding age has rightly regarded itself as a trustee; bound to guard carefully what it had received from those before, and to hand it on undiminished to those who came after.”82 At several other occasions, in the College Chapel or hall or in the Caian, Venn used his role as unofficial “College historian” to show that, being part of an unbroken succession of Caians, every Caian had an attachment to the college was both retrospective and prospective: “If there is a tie of gratitude to the past, there is also that of obligation to the future.”83 A commemoration address delivered in December 1894 bestowed praise on the “famous men” and the “host of the unrecorded” of Caius before ending with the words: “May others, in the days to come, say as much of us and of our efforts!”84 Venn looked on the college as an academic tree planted by the founders and pruned and nurtured by benefactors to bear a certain kind of fruit: the “sober, commonplace, and useful . . . clergyman, lawyer, and doctor.”85

Other Caians shared a similar sense of a Caian continuum of past, present, and future and the communal duties that came with membership of the college. The Caian editor made no apology for printing a long obituary list in an 1893 issue, simply noting that “if the generation that now is would seek models to live after and would maintain the reputation of their College . . . then these stories of lives well-spent will afford them food for thought and rich material for imitation.”86 J. de Soyres, the preacher of the 1898 commemoration sermon, likewise spoke of the “inspiring force which that great ‘Cloud of Witnesses,’ the past Worthies of our College, bring to bear on the practical life of its members.”87 Following such sentiments, in Caius College (1901) Venn retrospectively criticized the reforms of the royal commissions for a lack of historical sensitivity:

What those with antiquarian . . . tastes will most regret in [their] action . . . was the entire suppression of all individuality in the various endowments. Our College had, like all others, acquired, in the course of centuries and from many benefactors, a picturesque variety of endowments. . . . The Commissions . . . in their zeal for rigid equality and simplicity, sanctioned the plan of throwing all the various endowments into one fund, and thus suppressing the names of the donors. . . . Perhaps they thought that the benefactor belonged only to the past. If so, they were fortunately in the wrong.88

Venn wished to instill in all Caians, from undergraduates to the fellowship, the feeling that the college of the past was linked directly to the college of the present. This attempt formed one strand of the search for a renewed Caian identity, which found expression, first of all, in the new, looser framework of collegiate religion in the age of E. S. Roberts. Like the ancient universities at large, from the 1860s onward Caius had witnessed a trend of decline of clerical numbers, among both students and fellows, combined with increased provision made to support those who chose theological study or preparation for orders.89 These aspects reflected a fundamental change over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; religion, in general, and clerisy, more specifically, became a matter of personal vocation among a particular subgroup from whom commitment and specialization was demanded. The picture at Caius was more complex, however. On the one hand, Caius had always had a fair number of lay fellows, and, with religious commitment no longer being an official factor in academic preferment, fellowships accommodated those, like Venn, who openly expressed religious difficulties and even less orthodox men like George Romanes and Seeley.90 On the other hand, there were fellows, like Roberts and J. B. Lock, who chose to take Holy Orders even after the abolition of clerical fellowships and who, together with a majority of the fellowship, demonstrated a continued willingness to promote religious participation, not only for its own sake, but also, or even primarily, as a means to college community and as a civilizing influence on undergraduates. Fellows like Venn encouraged support for the College Chapel and College Mission for much the same reason as they advocated membership of the College Boat Club; in the face of gradual decline of the old structures of religion focused on mechanical observance, a loose synthesis of missionary and social concern and religious, sporting, and military participation seemed to offer a reworked Victorian liberal ideal of training the moral character as well as fostering the religious consciousness of the gentleman.91 At Caius, in the transition from Clayton’s dogmatic Evangelicalism to Robert’s Christian-based morality, the divisions between the religious and the secular were blurred, religion being but one element in a broader process of training and educating a new elite.

Venn would continue to attend College Chapel to the end of his life. At one occasion, he was allegedly seen in the president’s stall, “head bowed to his hands in prayer, peering through his fingers at the rather attractive mother of an undergraduate.”92 He also showed a continuing willingness to become involved, for example, in issues relating to the chapel, such as a committee for memorials and decorations in 1894 and a committee for a stained-glass window in 1895.93 These bodies were concerned, not, like the Chapel Committee, with matters of religion and worship, but with aspects of college history on which Venn came to be acknowledged as the authority. Venn was clearly aware of the sensitivity regarding his status as resigned cleric, or “apostate priest” as former theological lecturer, tutor, and dean of Caius the Regius Professor of Divinity H. B. Swete saw him.94 This sensitivity was expressed in the formal college record when Venn was invited in 1894 and 1904 to give an address rather than a sermon in the Caius College Chapel.95

With collegiate religion based on compulsion declining, college authorities at Caius encouraged those who chose to lead a religious life pursuing a separate strand that fostered communion through college ritual and worship. For example, in contrast with the shortening of services, celebration of Holy Communion was made more frequent, and the successive deans, Wallis and Arthur Knight, held Greek Testament classes in their rooms after morning services on Sundays for men of various academic schools and religious views.96 There was also the Service in Commemoration of Benefactors. Having been discontinued for several years, the practice of reading the commemoration at the evening chapel service on college feast days was revived by Roberts in 1894. A date was fixed for an annual commemoration in November, with an updated form of service drawn up by Roberts, Venn, and the dean in 1899.97 These public services were to establish a renewed sense of belonging to a college community consisting of men of diverse beliefs by forging meaningful historical connections between Caians past and present. Both through his books and in his many contributions to the Caian, which each highlighted different historical aspects of Caius, Venn did much to further this endeavor through a mix of historical awareness, religious sentiment, and national pride. “The links which thus bind man to man in any corporation or fraternity,” said Venn in an address delivered in the College Chapel after the Commemoration of Benefactors:

We may neglect them, forget them, profess to despise them, but they still exist. Nothing can remove that sense of continuity with the past which . . . is expressed in the words of the hymn, “Part of the host have crossed the flood, and part are crossing now.” . . . You remember Robert Browning’s reflections at the sight of Trafalgar and Cape St Vincent: “Here and here did England help me; how can I help England, say?98

There were changes too in the tone of collegiate religion at Caius. The Evangelicalism of the 1850s and 1860s had been transitory, but missionary enthusiasm became part of a wider development of university and college interest in British missions and Empire. That Caius prided itself on its missionaries became visible, for example, when a new college building was erected in 1869 and a junior fellow who had been appointed to the head of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa in 1859 was commemorated with a statue alongside such college icons as John Caius and William Harvey.99 Caius also established a College Mission and Settlement at Battersea in 1887, which linked mission work with philanthropic and educational ventures in an attempt to reinforce the loyalty of the churchgoers and reach those who did not attend College Chapel.100 The Caius Mission was neither founded by a college order nor funded from college endowment. Instead, it was the idea of college members who gave it the college’s name. In terms of both time and money, the mission had the support of the majority of the fellowship: three senior fellows acted as trustees on a loan to acquire a site, and the president, Benjamin Drury, donated a considerable sum to the building fund.101 On a more modest level, Venn acted as the patron of a fundraising concert and visited Battersea to give a lecture (“Science and Common Thought,” discussed in chapter 11).

The search for a renewed Caian identity also became apparent in the emergence of a range of collegiate ventures: the founding of sporting, literary, and social clubs; the adoption of the college colors (black and light blue); and the writing of the college song, “Carmen Caianum.” The first number of the Caian, established in 1891 on Robert’s initiative, comprising college news and belles lettres; an article on college history by Venn; and reports of the Boat House, the Rifle Volunteers, the Chess Club, the Debating and Musical Society, and athletic sports cricket and lawn tennis.102 Together with the College Mission and the College Settlement in Battersea, these extramural activities were part of “a more total vision of the life of Caius and of the ‘greater Caius,’” the alumni and nonresidents, “beyond the bounds of Cambridge.”103 Through his college histories, vast output in the Caian, addresses in the College Chapel, and role as treasurer of the Cricket Pavilion Fund, Venn became an active and valued contributor to the raising of “communal consciousness” in Caius.104 Venn’s works provided evidence of the invisible link between all those who had passed through the Gates of Humility, Virtue and Honour of Gonville and Caius. They also made college history a shared activity for the men of “greater Caius”: where some, like J. S. Reid, served as proofreaders, others formed the audience of Venn’s speeches and lectures at commemorations, feasts, and society meetings; subscribed to the volumes of Biographical History; or responded to requests for information about themselves or about Caians in their immediate vicinity.

Much like in his work on the Venn family Annals, however, in writing the history of his college, Venn also had to come to terms with breaks in the continuity, “which is so impressive an element in the life of an ancient college like ours,” particularly the changes that had been introduced by the university reform of the 1850s to 1880s.105 During the years of Venn’s tenure as a junior and senior fellow, the traditional model of shared residence, dining, prayer, and study had been deeply affected, for instance, by the reform of endowments, the freedom of fellows to marry, the admission of non-Anglicans, and the specialization of new triposes. As the later college historian noted, by a paradox exactly these crucial decades were “singularly ill-recorded” by Venn; though he detailed the changes of the period “with such precision,” in Biographical History and Early Collegiate Life, he “failed to describe how they were achieved.”106 Venn’s reserve was partly due to the “historian’s dilemma”—the present always seeming too familiar to stand in need of documentation—and partly tact to the older fellows, above all to the master, his friend Ferrers, who died in 1903. Ferrers had never been a reformer, neither in “the world of teaching or curriculum” nor in “the relations of college and University.”107 When he was elected master in 1880, Ferrers’s first decision was to organize the Annual Gathering of Past and Present, which, as the anonymous author (writing in a style similar to Venn’s) observed in his obituary in the Caian, did “much to knit together older and younger members [and] to keep alive or rekindle the affection of past generations of graduates for their ancient academic home.”108 A few years later, on Easter Day 1882, Ferrers mounted to the pulpit of Great St. Mary’s, Cambridge, to denounce the work of the second royal commission—as Benedict Chapman and Edwin Guest before him had renounced that of the first commission:

We are passing through a crisis in the structure of the University, and in the mutual relation of its constituent parts to it and to each other. . . . Has the leading idea been that of . . . modifying the structure of our body politic that, while its powers are renovated and increased, it shall not lose its identity? . . . Or has the apparent object been to disregard the old landmarks, and to rear on the ruins of the Cambridge which we have known, an edifice . . . more immediately suited to the needs of the moment, but dissociated from the memories of the past, and so deprived . . . of the guarantee of stability from thence resulting, which a connection with those memories would secure?109

When the last volume of Biographical History appeared some twenty years later, Venn solved the problem of his own involvement in the reforms that put an end to the three-hundred-years-long rule of John Caius’s statutes by leaving Ferrers’s mastership entirely undiscussed.

From the turn of the century on, Venn himself came to share not only with Sidgwick a disappointment over what the Moral Sciences Tripos had become, but also, with Ferrers, an estrangement from the winds of change that sought to shake off the ties that for him contributed to what it meant to be a Venn, a Caian and a Cambridge man: “The Liberalism of the University about the middle of the century, was, as elsewhere, mainly destructive. . . . Most of the changes it effected were, I fully believe, essential in their general character; but one may nevertheless fairly complain of the astonishing indifference shown towards all those links with the past which are the great distinguishing features of our ancient colleges and Universities.”110 These were the links that made it bearable and, at times, enjoyable for Venn to live in the rapidly changing present.

Epilogue

A Worldless Victorian

Between 1896 and 1900 Venn sustained two households, one in Cambridge and one on the south coast for his wife and son, who was educated at Eastbourne College.1 In 1899, having decided that they could never feel at home anywhere else, the Venns resolved to make their final home in Cambridge once their son was old enough to go up to Trinity and by 1901 had found a permanent home at Vicarsbrook, 87 Chaucer Road, Cambridge. There had come an abrupt end to Venn’s active career of teaching and writing on logic in 1900, when he almost died of pneumonia in a London hotel.

One more move was briefly considered by the Venns when Ferrers, the master of Caius, died and the selection of a new master took place in 1903. Rather than the senior tutor, E. S. Roberts, Venn seems to have been the most serious candidate for the role, on account of his seniority among the fellowship and his track record of service to the college. Venn was willing to accept if there was a decided majority in his favor, but he nonetheless asked William Ridgeway to withdraw his name. “Five or six years ago the odds are that I should have been elected,” he wrote to his brother: “as things now are my wish for the post has fallen far more than my chance. There is much against it—a detestable house, no garden, a lot of hateful ceremony, &c, &c.”2 After another unpleasant turn of events, Roberts was elected in February 1903, and Venn was made president of the college—an honorary office he would accept once more when the mastership of Caius fell vacant on the death of Roberts and Hugh Kerr Anderson was elected as his successor.3

Gentle Leisure (1903–14)

At Vicarsbrook, Chaucer Road, in the first few years of the 1900s, Venn acquired a habit of “gentle leisure.” He spent his days reading what the Times Book Club had to offer, writing letters to a small circle of friends and to strangers who contacted him in search of information about their pedigrees, occasionally venturing out socially to meet Catherine Stephen or one of the Darwins, going to College Chapel on Sunday mornings, “brushing up half-forgotten acquirements” for a new edition of The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic, and pursuing his lifelong botanical hobby in his large garden.4 From the 1870s to the 1890s, the Venns had been in the “full swing” of Cambridge life as active members of local civic society involved in the original plans for women’s education, the Charity Organizations Society (of which Venn became vice chairman in 1884); the Provident Medical Institution (which Venn headed as vice president in 1886); and competitions of the Cambridgeshire Horticultural Society, winning prizes for their roses and white carrots, and of the Romsey Town Flower Show.5 During the early twentieth century, when Venn was still able to “keenly enjoy much of what life has to give,” some of these “town-and-gown” activities were continued: he became president of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society (1908–9) and cosigned with his wife, Susanna, and Maud Darwin, Florence Ada Keynes, and several others, a letter to the Cambridge Independent Press published on 16 October 1908, encouraging women to put themselves forward as candidates for the upcoming Cambridge Town Council elections.6

Venn, ever of spare build, had always been a keen traveler, walker, and mountaineer—for many decades visiting Wales or the Lake District and parts of the Continent almost yearly. “In old days,” he wrote in 1906, “I was passionately fond of the Alps; &, like most active-bodied men of my date & tastes, used to hold that they were the natural place in summer for any one who could not plainly prove that duty sent him elsewhere or kept him at house.”7 After his first visit to the Alps with Arthur Ransome in 1857, when they made the ascent of the Schilhorn from Lauterbrunnen, in 1865 there followed an “old-fashioned pedestrian expedition with knapsack on back” to Zermatt, where John and his brother, Henry, met the famous party that first climbed the Matterhorn only a few hours before their fatal descent.8 Some four decades later, Venn, around seventy years of age, was healthy enough to take his son, John Archibald, and his son’s wife, Lucy Venn, on a three-week trip to Switzerland and Italy—“to show them how to do it again”—and was cynical enough to observe that “the lakes & mountains were all there, but how their surroundings were changed! Spots up to which I had toiled in old days with knapsack on back, probably to find a few Cambridge acquaintances in a rough wooden Inn, were now reached by a few minutes of railway. And when one stepped out of the car it was to find a Hotel that might have been transported from the Embankment, where crows in evening dress were listening to the band, & playing bridge.”9

Venn, forever the anima naturaliter Christiana, occupied a religious position, completely “indefensible in logic,” that left him out of sympathy with most of the men at Cambridge: “Emotionally all my nature clings to the faith of the past, or at least to the practices & forms founded on that faith, whilst intellectually I doubt & mistrust in every direction. And unfortunately there is no known means of reconciling differences between the different parts of our nature. So I wobble, & tend to become an object of pity or reproach to the robust who find the path clear on one side or the other.”10 An apostate priest to some, a fainthearted doubter to others, Venn possessed a religious outlook that had become one of an easy-going, practical, this-worldly Christianity centered around worship. Venn remained a habitual church-and-college-chapel-goer for whom, like William James in Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)—a book Venn felt was well worth reading twice—the lived experience of religion mattered much more than doctrine or dogma.11 As Venn’s own curate days receded further into the past and the memories of the Te Deum chanted by village children in the wooden church in Grasmere or Cheshunt became stronger, it was the clerical life that most appealed to his religious sentiments. “I am as you know,” he wrote in a letter of February 1903, “not one of those who have pulled off their surplice & stamped on it,—or cut it up into towels & napkins. On the contrary, . . . at this day, there are few posts which I should more enjoy, in many ways, than that of a country vicar.”12 But, as he was quick to add, “there is a shut gate, with 39 iron spikes on it, which bars the way.”13

At Cambridge, Venn observed the passing of time among his family and friends and was conscious of both a narrowing of his horizons and a culture changing around him. When Sidgwick died in 1900, Leslie Stephen wrote to Venn that as the links of his old association with Cambridge passed away one by one, the place became “rather a sad one for me.”14 Between 1900 and 1910, several of Venn’s own connections with the past were broken by the death of family members—his sister, Henrietta Venn (1902); his cousins Leslie Stephen (1904) and Caroline Stephen (1909)—as well as of university friends like Sidgwick (1900), Ferrers (1903), and Maitland (1906). “I am old enough now to have read not a few biographies of men of about my time whom I have known here in Cambridge,” Venn wrote upon receiving a copy of Richard Jebb’s Life and Letters.15 Venn increasingly came to regret his own “childish shyness”—grounded in the circumstances of his youth, with no brother of his own age, the very early death of his mother, and his father’s absorption in his work—which caused him to have “always been much of a lonely person”:

Nothing can replace . . . the fatal & irreplaceable loss of family friends . . . & I never cease to feel the lack of that ease & confidence in one’s surroundings which is the share of those who have been hedged in by a circle of immemorial friends. Of course it was largely the fault of my own shyness. When I came here [at Cambridge] as a freshman there must have been a number of sons of old family friends, Claphamite &c, whom I might have consorted with, but there was no previous intimacy to give me a start; & none of them was at my College.16

The close geographical association centered on Clapham had been long lost, and many had gone their own religious way in isolation, but the ties of kinship among the Clapham descendants remained a strong bond. The episode of Venn’s near death and Susanna Venn’s mental breakdown in 1900 had illustrated the continuing connection between several Claphamite families—the Venns, the Stephens, and the Diceys, the younger generation of which had played together as children at Highgate and Hereford. When in 1900 Susanna Venn had allegedly made the statement that her husband was mentally unstable, Henrietta Venn alerted her brother Henry to their sister-in-law’s health crisis. A series of letters went around from Henry Venn’s wife, Louisa Venn, to Caroline Stephen and then to Albert Venn Dicey and finally back to Henry Venn before a consensus was reached; a letter was solicited from the family doctor that was to affirm Venn’s sanity and Susanna Venn’s “delusions” as insurance against the possible event that Venn might die and his wife might contest the (financial, parental, etc.) arrangements made in his will.17

Caroline Stephen, daughter of James and Catherine (née Venn) Stephen and sister of the Stephen brothers, settled in Cambridge in 1885, where she told students at Newnham College and Girton College about her Quaker beliefs, cared for her niece Virginia Woolf after the death of her father, Leslie Stephen, in 1904, and stood in regular contact with the Venns. A final message from Caroline Stephen was recorded in Susanna Venn’s commonplace book: “The broad and beautiful spaces of the unseen shine out against the dark background—please tell SCV.”18 Many years later, John and Susanna Venn made the rare effort to venture out socially in order to meet Dicey when he stayed with the Darwins, and to attend a dinner hosted by Caroline Stephen’s niece, the future principal of Newnham College, Catherine Stephen.19 The connection between Venn and the Stephen brothers had become more distant as they “drifted apart” in academic and religious terms over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, but in a letter of condolence to Venn following the death of his sister, Henrietta, in 1902, Leslie Stephen wrote (see figure E.1):

E.1 Letter from Leslie Stephen to Venn, 2 September 1902. GCA, Venn Papers, C12/4. Reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

Among my earliest memories are some of your father’s [house] at Highgate & of playing there. . . . I have always, I hope, retained the feeling which I had then & in later years. . . . Your father has always seemed to me to have been one of the best men I ever knew: and though I have seen but little of Henrietta in late years, I have always seemed to be in relation to her, especially through her friendship with [Caroline Stephen]. To my sister, the loss will be only less than to you & if only for that reason I should feel it strongly. Let me say too that I have a genuine affection for you—& could not be indifferent to any trouble of your’s.

The old world to which we belonged is vanishing very rapidly; I had sufficient warnings that I shall not be a remnant of it for very long. I have lost too much to feel any reluctance to follow. But whole I live.”20

Venn had a remarkably open correspondence with Laura Mary Forster, a descendant of Henry and Marianna Thornton and the aunt of the novelist E. M. Forster, and his second cousin Dicey, the son of Anne Mary Stephen, sister of Leslie and Fitzjames Stephen’s father, James Stephen. Laura Forster and Venn shared a friendship with the families of Francis (“Frank”) Darwin and Horace Darwin at Cambridge, with whom Venn stood in both personal and academic contact and whom he visited occasionally.21 Albert Venn Dicey, living and working in Oxford between 1882 and 1909 and teaching in London from 1896 on, was the surviving male relation of Clapham descent with whom Venn stood in closest contact. Dicey had drifted away from the moderate Evangelicalism of his parents into an undogmatic Christianity but had not wrestled with his conscience in the way his cousins Fitzjames and Leslie Stephen and his second cousin Venn had done. Much like Venn, however, Dicey never lost interest in religion, and his work bore the Evangelical stamp of fervor and usefulness even more strongly than that of Venn, political activity becoming his secular vocation. Both family history and joint worship of Clapham formed the core of their conversation, supplemented by mutual interests in current affairs (Home Rule, free trade, etc.) and theological matters (date of the Gospels, the historical Jesus, etc.). Venn’s discussion in the protected environment of private correspondence with Dicey—as well as the Combination Room and the Ad Eundem Club, for which Dicey often traveled to Cambridge—added to his complex identity certain elements of post-Claphamite connection based on social and political interaction.22

Perhaps the most important reason for Venn to engage in family history was his wish for those who would come after him to keep up these family relationships. Much like his own father had once done, he strongly felt that John Archibald (while studying at Trinity College) “ought to make acquaintance” with every possible relative, be it a second or even a third cousin.23 With the foresight of his son working on university records for some years to come, possibly eventually leading to permanent employment at the University Registry, Venn wanted to prepare him for the benefits and drawbacks of Cambridge life: “Living in a University, I am not likely to overrate mere intellectual acuteness—which is as common here as scrap in the Sheffield works—in comparison with the tender consideration to others which gives life nearly all its beauty, & which is rare indeed here compared with what I have seen in various country vicarages.”24 At the same time, John and Susanna Venn enjoyed the presence of the “young people”—“Archie” and his wife, Lucy—in Cambridge, where the couple settled at 10 Brookside, a ten-minute walk from Vicarsbrook, soon after their marriage in April 1906. With John Venn of Clapham, both father and son shared not only an antiquarian interest but also a liking for mechanics. Already as a young boy at Highgate, Venn had tried his hand at making brass cannons and a steam engine at the old-fashioned wooden turning lathe he received as a gift from his father; some fifty years later, he even published in Nature a rare note on the leading British engineer Alexander Kennedy’s Mechanics and Machinery (1886).25 Around 1907–8, father and son together built a machine for bowling cricket balls, which became the talk of the town when the Australian team visited Fenner’s, Cambridge, in June 1909 and the star player Victor Trumper was clean bowled by it four times. “All the Australians were enthusiastic over its merits, which certainly are unique,” reported New Zealand’s oldest newspaper, the Wanganui Chronicle: “The machine is quite small and easily portable, and the delivery, or propulsion, is secured by a seven and a half foot arm moving from a joint at its base. The ball can be made to twist or break—as much as 3ft., if required—and, once set, the same length, pace, etc., can be depended upon for as long as desired.”26 All agreed that the Venns had hit on “a veritable gold mine”; the machine was patented in England, the United States, and Australia.27

The Venn-Dicey Correspondence

Both sons of Claphamites and former disciples of Mill, Venn and Dicey had known each other since childhood but drew more closely together in the first years of the twentieth century, as their friends and relations died off one by one and they themselves became “survivors of a past generation.”28 Besides occasional visits at each other’s houses in Cambridge and Oxford, where Dicey had been the Vinerian Professor of English Law from 1882 until his retirement in 1909, and social meetings at the homes of mutual friends like the Darwins, they stood in contact mainly through frequent correspondence. Venn and Dicey found each other in family history and joint worship of the Clapham myth; and in the many letters written in the years preceding and during the First World War, they reinforced this bond by common, current interests in theological, social, and political issues.

Venn, the university reformer who for a long time believed that “everything which had gone on [for] more than 30 or 40 years must be bad,” had given his vote in support of the Radical side of the Liberal Party in the period between the 1860s and early 1880s.29 A breaking point came when the leader of the Liberal Party, W. E. Gladstone, proposed “Home Rule” for Ireland in 1886. Like Seeley, Ferrers, Sidgwick, James Ward, Fitzjames Stephen, Dicey, and many other men of letters and the university, Venn threw in his lot with Liberal Unionism: a hybrid of traditional liberalism and patriotism with steadfast opposition to any scheme of Home Rule.30 Seeley, Ferrers and Sidgwick took a public stand at a Unionist meeting in Cambridge in 1886; Stephen and Dicey became prominent spokespersons of the Liberal Unionist cause. Between 1886 and 1913, Dicey, following the constitutional principles outlined in his first major work, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (1882), wrote no fewer than four books against Home Rule.31 England’s Case against Home Rule—in which he argued that Home Rule would not only destroy parliamentary sovereignty but also reverse the historic expansion of the British state and its empire and subvert the integrity of the United Kingdom—was even cited (ironically, by Gladstone himself) in Parliament in the 1880s. Venn was not interested in taking a public stance, preferring instead to confine his arguments to after-dinner discussions in the Combination Room and correspondence with Dicey.32 Ever since the 1886 Liberal split, there had always been much agreement between Venn and Dicey; however, in 1903 a “decided cleavage of opinion” occurred over the other main radical measure of the period, “Tariff Reform,” whereby tax revenue would be raised on imports, with preferential rates for goods from within the British Empire.33 Venn turned away from the “old orthodoxy” of laissez-faire and free trade in the conservative direction indicated by Joseph Chamberlain, who in 1903 resigned from the Conservative–Liberal Unionist cabinet to campaign for preferential tariffs.34 Many years later, when Dicey asked him to coauthor an article for the Nineteenth Century and After against free trade in times of war, Venn declined because he was “shy & rather reluctant” and no longer cared for “controversies & criticisms.”35

During the year 1909, there was “a whirlwind of talk” between Venn and Dicey on the Finance Bill (“People’s Budget”), a proposal of the 1905–15 Liberal government, championed by the chancellor, David Lloyd George, and his young ally Winston Churchill, that introduced unprecedented taxes on the very wealthy to fund new social welfare programs.36 Dicey was “ready to cast any stone I can find against it” and consulted Venn to check whether some of the arguments that he was going to use were “economically sound.”37 A few years later, their discussion turned again to what the Spectator—the magazine that they both avidly read—called “the two movements of imminent danger to the Commonwealth: Home Rule and Female Suffrage.”38 At the request of “some Irish Unionists,” Dicey published a cheap edition of A Leap in the Dark (1895), and by 1914 he sought to do whatever he could to impede Home Rule: a popular referendum before Irish Home Rule could be passed by Parliament, “for the King to dissolve Parliament and cause an election on Home Rule,” “for the Crown to withhold Royal Assent after Home Rule passed the Commons,” or even “to declare Home Rule unconstitutional if it did not receive the People’s consent.”39 Of some of these (arguably “un-Diceyan”) measures, Dicey made abundantly clear that they were not to be submitted to the public eye: “Personally—but this is private to you,” he wrote to Venn in March 1914, “I shall be pleased if [King George V] said to [H. H. Asquith, the Liberal prime minister] that in his opinion the Home Rule Act ought not to be passed until it has received the undoubted assent of the nation. . . . Please destroy this letter. I have written to you quite freely.”40 Unlike other Unionists, Venn agreed with Dicey about the constitutional legitimacy of “dragging the King into politics,” and in March 1914 he acted on Dicey’s urgent call to sign the “British Covenant” against Home Rule.41 When in April 1914 Dicey concluded that “it is all too late” and “the time for fair compromise has arrived,” his correspondence with Venn turned to a discussion over the relative benefits of a form of colonialism or independence as an alternative for a federalist solution to the “Irish question.”42 On the eve of war, they decided to let their battle against Home Rule and women’s suffrage recede into the background: Dicey because he felt that he had to abstain from political controversy destructive of the war effort, and Venn since he had other matters on his mind, like a sickly wife at home in a Cambridge that was then being transformed from a quiet university town to a military camp, and a son sent to Sheringham, Norfolk, as a second lieutenant of the “62nd Provisional Battalion,” which guarded the coast.43

First World War at Home (1914–18)

When the First World War broke out in the middle of the long vacation of 1914, there suddenly arose a new Cambridge: as the first divisions of the British Expeditionary Force passed across the channel to France and Belgium, caps and gowns were replaced by khaki, all open spaces were occupied by the encampments of the Sixth Division, and colleges were turned into either officers’ schools (Pembroke), hospitals (Trinity College), or military headquarters (Caius).44 At Caius in 1914–15, officers of the Third Rifle Brigade encamped on Midsummer Common were made honorary members of the Senior Combination Room and invited to take their meals in college and dine at the High Table. After the Sixth Division had departed for France, Caius became the headquarters of the First Army, Central Force, and housed General Sir Bruce Hamilton and his staff of eighteen. Of the twenty-seven fellows at Caius, seven joined the forces; of the others, those who could not fight like the 248 Caians commemorated on the war memorial tablet at Caius did support the war effort in various other ways. Where the master, H. K. Anderson, for instance, worked for a time in the Ministries of Munitions and Agriculture, Venn entertained officers over lunch, took wounded captains and privates out for long drives, and cut out bags for hot-water bottles for the Red Cross stores.45

During the “anxious & perturbing times” at Cambridge, where “nothing else but Zeps & Hospital work are thought of, or talked about,” the Venns nevertheless tried to continue a normal life.46 With their horizons narrowing, their daily routine in these years was centered around sending letters to their son in Sheringham about war events, the weather, and their health and desperately waiting either for his reply or for what his wife, Lucy, was able to tell about his “doings & goings.”47 Most of the letters were written by Susanna Venn, who frequently fell ill and was often bedridden for days on end. Together, Susanna and John Venn continued their son’s work for Alumni Cantabrigienses, plodding away at cards and records. “Of course, it is monotonous work,” as Venn wrote in 1916, “but [that] is one good of it, in such anxious & perturbing times as these” as it “helps to fill up all my time & partially to occupy my thoughts.”48 At the age of eighty-two, Venn was still active enough to go “townwards daily as usual with success”—occasionally dining in Caius and reading sermons and newspapers to his old Caian friends Francis and Whiting, who could no longer see or hear well—to visit his old friend Garrick in Norwich, and to see his son for part of a day in Sheringham at the coast: “It was a medley of Peace & War. On the sands the children paddling, & the young people bathing, as in other years. But the coast was lined with trenches & barbed wire; soldiers were everywhere steepening the cliffs; aero-plane scouts (our own) flying over-head; & some 14 mine-sweepers coming to anchor after their days work. I had not been there since the days before the Railway.”49 At least until 1918, Venn believed the First World War to be a necessary evil—a struggle to let “Right prevail over Wrong.”50 Already at the turn of the century, Venn had expressed anti-German sentiment when speaking of “such eminently disagreeable persons as the ordinary Germans”; in the midst of the war, he devoured “book after book that I will know make me hate the German more than ever.”51 “Of course there [are] evils in a standing army,” wrote Venn in February 1917, “but the conduct of other nations has made [it] absolutely necessary” not merely go to war but also to break with the policy of business as usual.52 Around the time of the Battle of the Somme, where Britain suffered over four hundred thousand casualties, Venn remained to share with Dicey the deeply held feeling of “England as the great free state” that was to bring Germany “to her knees” at whatever cost.53

After the war came disillusionment. “What a welter of a world we live in!” exclaimed Venn in a letter to Dicey of September 1921: “I used to pray (1914–1918) that I might live to see Right prevail over Wrong. To pray now that any of us may live to see Sanity triumph over Madness would be almost presumptuous.”54

A World Lost (1918–23)

As the old world to which he had belonged vanished before his own eyes, the category of Victorianism came to possess more and more meaning for Venn. “I’m enough of a Victorian—of course, I am by birth pre-Victorian—to be a fond admirer of Walter Scott,” Venn wrote to a friend in 1915.55 Venn contrasted his own tastes in literature shaped by the Victorian age with an utter lack of comprehension of the ethics of modern French novels:

“He” and “she” are found [in] each other’s arms; tears streaming to the ground. The problem is whether it is a case of “amitié” or of “amour.” It is concluded to be a case of the former; so, as their freedom is not compromised, they make a bolt to Italy; Situation as before: tears [fall] on the marble floor at Venice. It seems it is “amour” after all, so there is nothing left but to part.

It may be all we want to make a better world; but somehow I understand W. Scott better.56

Venn also enjoyed the Englishness of Jane Austen’s novels and characters, especially since many of the scenes took place in Devonshire and Somerset, the districts of his ancestors with which he was so thoroughly familiar.57 At the Cambridge Union, however, Venn was the main supporter of the French Department as he was more a reader of mid-nineteenth-century French novels than English. “I believe that this is partly due to old Evangelical puritan traditions,” he explained himself in 1917: “This will sound odd at first; but if you combine the once prevalent conviction in such circles, that a novel in itself was but sorry food for a human soul, with the conviction derived from the governess & the school-room, that if one was reading French one was at least doing something useful, you will see how it comes about.”58 Around 1900–1901, when, a few months before the death of Queen Victoria, his own life almost ended, Venn had begun his old man’s habit “of contrasting the old & the new.”59 Over the course of the first two decades of the twentieth century, the comparisons were sometimes innocent and picturesque, when they concerned, for example, “modes of getting about” or “notions of travelling”; at other times, they were nostalgic, romanticizing the Clapham days, naively optimistic, asking how the Pax Britannica could possibly end, or simply dogmatic, condemning in toto the “superficiality of modern life.”60 All of Venn’s reflections were in one way or another expressions of what he himself called a “mid-Victorian” spirit formed in the Claphamite mold; that of duty, hard work, self-sacrifice, patriotism, and religious sentiment—and also, to a certain extent, that of dry humor, manly vigor, and healthy leisure.61

During the late 1910s, Venn came to feel like a “fossil” of a bygone era—a Victorian in Georgian times who survived through the golden Edwardian and dark war days and whose heart lay with the corner of Paradise called Clapham and the “grand time of [our] Expansion.”62 A typical Victorian also in his embrace of paradox, Venn mourned the loss of the old world as much as he refused to believe that it could ever really be lost. Already in 1907, worries abounded as to how Britain would keep its status as the icon of civilization and the moral example for nations across the globe without Victorian values to sustain it: “I can’t but wonder what will be the outcome of two or three generations such as we see all round us now. . . . An average British public, absolved from all religious feeling, & without even any second-hand tradition of devotion behind them, does not seem a promising agent for high achievements.”63 Notwithstanding his own undogmatic and vague Christianity, Venn always remained fully committed to the importance of organized religion—compulsory chapel, observance of Sunday worship, and so on—to the social cohesion springing from the alignment of public and private morality. After the horrors of the First World War, early in 1919, he dismissed the “popular objection, at the present day, that if there were [an ‘infinite’] Being, He could never have suffered such a war as this to take place” as nothing but “the illusion of over-estimating what strikes us at the moment.”64 Venn, enough of a wrangler to reason in lines and figures and old enough to live, think, and feel sub specie aeternitatis, rejoined:

Suppose that someone with the requisite power & information were to make an “inventory” of all the suffering & guilt which has taken place, year by year, over the whole world during the last 20 centuries, & were to display it in figures, or a diagram, do you suppose that we should notice any peculiar rise in the figures for 1914–8? I very much doubt it.

I can’t get over a similar conviction that the corresponding chart for the happiness & the good of the world would represent a slow & steady rise on the whole. But no proof is available.65

“A Void in the Daily Life of Cambridge”

Venn died on Wednesday 4 April 1923, aged eighty-eight, in his house in Cambridge. The funeral took place on Saturday 7 April. The first part of the service was held in Caius Chapel, where the dean, the Reverend J. W. Hunkin officiated, assisted by the Reverend A. C. Moule, vicar of Trumpington. The interment was at the Trumpington Parish Extension.

“The serious nature of Dr Venn’s illness was known to few and the announcement of its fatal termination came with a shock of surprise to many of his friends,” wrote H. T. Francis, a friend for nearly seventy years, in his in memoriam:

It is hardly an exaggeration of language to say that the world at large and especially his own University and College are appreciably the poorer for his loss, and apart from sincere regret for his death, it is recognised that in the passing away of the President of Caius a remarkable and striking personality has suddenly disappeared and left a void in the daily life of Cambridge that cannot easily be filled.

. . . Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus

Tam cari capitis.66

Already in October 1920 Venn had drawn up his last will, but as each of his obituaries—whether in the Caian, the Times, or the Proceedings of the Royal Society—pointed out, he retained most of his bodily and mental activity to the very end.67 After 1918–19 he had rarely slept out of the house and between 1920 and 1923 had experienced the drawbacks of old age—“illness at home, & consequent lack of mobility”—with the doctor (“Bradbury”) and nurses being invoked increasingly often, especially for his wife, Susanna.68 Venn himself found his time pleasantly occupied with occasional trips to the library, the Alumni Cantabrigienses, political biographies, and memoirs inside and the large garden outside. Throughout his long life, Venn had shown a keen interest in botany, in which he became proficient; he could recognize at sight any wildflower or plant he came across in his walks around Cambridge. Having won prizes for his roses and carrots, Venn also cultivated some Alpine plants in his garden such as the edelweiss, which he would, by way of practical joke, “take abroad with him to Switzerland and flaunt at table d’hôte in his button-hole. The guests were naturally full of excitement and admiration of the stranger’s mountaineering prowess in having scaled some perilous height to secure so enviable a prize.”69 Venn was survived by his wife, Susanna, who, when she died in in 1931, was described in the Times as “known only to a sadly depleted circle of old friends.”70 Their son went on to become the youngest head of a college when he was elected president of Queens’ College, Cambridge, in 1932, a post that he combined between 1941 and 1943 with the vice-chancellorship of Cambridge and held until his death in March 1958. The transition from an Evangelical dynasty to an academic elite was complete, yet short-lived; John Archibald and Lucy Venn adopted a daughter in 1932, but there was no next generation in the male line to survive their branch of the Venn family.

Around 1932 John Archibald Venn made a final attempt to continue the family tradition of biography when he contacted William Blackwood and Sons with a proposal to publish a collection of family diaries, including his father’s Annals, and records of travel and life abroad: “While admittedly all of it is not of equal value, I feel convinced that, under some such title as ‘My Forebears at Home and Abroad, in Peace and War’, or ‘Four Sovereigns, Family Recollections of India and Cambridge’, a publication would, in the upshot, prove itself justified.”71 The proposal turned out unsuccessful, and hence the autobiographical Annals was never published.72 Since there were no direct heirs to continue the family tradition of biography, all memories of Venn are now lost. What remains are the traces he left behind, in books, papers, letters, and notes, and in the minds of those who have read them.

Acknowledgments

My first debt is to Volker Peckhaus, whom I have never met, but who, when I submitted yet another article on John Venn for publication in the journal of which he is the editor, kindly suggested to write something more comprehensive. My second debt is to Michelle Clewlow and William K. Stockton, without whose pioneering PhD dissertations this book could not have been written (and on which it sometimes draws quite freely). My third debt is to the archivists at Gonville and Caius College and Trinity College, Cambridge; the Cadbury Research Library, Birmingham; the Glasgow University Library, Glasgow; and the Society of Genealogists, London. James Cox (Caius) and Jonathan Smith (Trinity) were especially welcoming and helpful on my many visits. My fourth debt is to Simon Schaffer, who acted as my sponsor professor during my time as a visiting scholar in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge, in January and July 2017. A Grattan-Guinness Archival Research Travel Grant allowed me to undertake the travels and stays needed to make the most of my research time there. The bulk of the research for this book was carried out with a VENI grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), grant number 275-20-66. My fifth debt is to the two anonymous readers for taking so much care with the manuscript and for offering valuable comments and challenges, and to Kathleen Kageff for her very careful copyediting and June Sawyers for compiling the index. I am also very grateful to my editor, Karen Merikangas Darling, as well as to Joel Score, with whom it has been a great pleasure to work; to Tristan Bates, Rebecca Brutus, and Deirdre Kennedy for production and marketing assistance; and to the University of Chicago Press design and production departments. My sixth debt is to Christopher Stray, my unofficial mentor, for all his help and support.

My last and most important debt is to my parents, Hannet and Peter; my wife, Judith; and our daughter, Johanna—for being there.

Given the Venn family’s centuries-old biographical tradition, it sometimes felt almost inappropriate for a relative outsider like myself to write Venn’s biography. At these moments, Venn’s own struggle to preserve the family archive for future generations—combined with the donation by his son, John Archibald Venn, of a large portion of the manuscripts—reassured and greatly encouraged me.

I would like to thank the following for permitting me to quote from materials in their collections: Church Missionary Society Unofficial Papers (Accession 81: Venn Papers), Cadbury Research Library, Special Collections, University of Birmingham; the Master and Fellows of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (John Venn papers); the Glasgow University Library, Archives and Special Collections (Miscellaneous Correspondence and Papers of A. V. Dicey); the director and university librarian of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester (Jevons Archives); the Society of Genealogists Library, Special Collections; the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge (Mayor and Sidgwick papers); and the University College London, Library Special Collections, (Galton Archive).

Portions of chapters 7 and 10 of this book appeared in an earlier form as “Pragmatism at Cambridge, England before 1900,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, and “The First Random Walk: A Note on John Venn’s Graph,” Mathematical Intelligencer, 42, 41–45 (2020). I am thankful to Taylor and Francis and Springer Nature for allowing me to reproduce parts of those articles here.

Notes

Preface

1. Anonymous (1881), 234.

2. John Stuart Mill to John Venn, 16 April 1872, GCA, Venn Papers, C52/4.

3. Venn, “Annals,” 104.

4. Venn, “Annals,” 98.

5. A selection of Venn’s correspondence and unpublished writings, including his autobiographical sketch, are included in Verburgt (2021).

6. John Venn to Henry J. Hunter, 4 February 1883, CMS Venn, C42.

7. I would like to thank David Dunning for this suggestion, which he will take up in a forthcoming paper.

8. Macaulay (1894 [1825]), 80.

Chapter 1

1. The following biographical accounts are chiefly based on Venn’s own Annals of a Clerical Family (Venn [1904a]).

2. See “Parentalia: Biographies of Richard 1601–62 and Dennis Venn 1648–95 compiled by John Venn of Clapham (c. 1700); Notes on Venn family by John Venn, Henry Venn of CMS, and John Venn, b. 1834 (c. 1900),” CMS Venn, F60.

3. Charities in the County of Devon (1830), 136.

4. See Donations of Peter Blundell (1802 [1792]); Report of the Commissioners concerning Charities (1830), 94; G. M. Edwards (1899), 51–52; Jones (2005 [1988]), 84–85.

5. See, in this regard, Chamberlain (1997), chapter 1; and Sack (1993).

6. Tolley (1997) has shown that private family writing became an important ritual in Victorian households and that this was due to the influence of the families whose forefathers were connected to the “Clapham Sect,” such as the Stephens, Thorntons, Wilberforces, and, it is safe to say, the Venns.

7. Much has been written on the history of Evangelical conversion. Hindmarsh (2007) provides a good starting point.

8. John Venn of Clapham in H. Venn (of CMS) (1834), 19–20. On the eighteenth-century Evangelical revival, see, for example, Bebbington (1989); Hindmarsh (2001); J. M. Turner (2002); Walsh (1966); and Walsh (1994).

9. John Venn of Clapham in H. Venn (of CMS) (1834), 22. See, in this regard, also J. Stephen (1849), 308; and Henry Venn of Huddersfield in H. Venn (of CMS) (1834), 361. From Henry Venn’s letters it is clear that he was, in fact, influenced by his reading of Wesley’s writings. See Tomkins (2010), 29.

10. H. Venn (of CMS) (1834), 18.

11. Whitefield to Lady Huntingdon cited in Seymour (1839), 225; Henry Venn of CMS, cited in Tomkins (2010), 29.

12. For this phrase, see Seymour (1839), 276; Wesley in Venn (1904a), 78; Bateman (1880), 98.

13. See John Venn of Clapham in H. Venn (of CMS) (1834), 50; and Henry Venn of Huddersfield in H. Venn (of CMS) (1834), 408, 374–76. On the influence of Evangelicalism at Cambridge in the eighteenth century, see, for example, Loane (1952); Gascoigne (1988), part 3; and Walsh (1975).

14. Venn (1904a), 74.

15. Henry Venn of CMS quoted in Venn and Venn (1880), 49.

16. See Venn (1904a), 114. Henry Venn of CMS also visited Oxford, but his inquiries about the state of that university could not convince him of its moral and religious superiority to Cambridge.

17. During the 1770s and 1780s, Magdalene was transformed into an Evangelical college mainly because of the Elland Clerical Society, which had been founded in 1767 by Henry Venn of Huddersfield and was generously supported by Wilberforce, the Thorntons, and others. The first Elland pensioner entered Magdalene in 1778, and by 1796–97 twelve of its fifteen undergraduates were Elland pensioners. See Walsh (1958). See D. M. Thomson (2008), chapter 3, about the similar transformation of Queens’ College in the early nineteenth century.

18. See Smyth (1940), 18–19. In Simeon, that “singular gownsman of King’s College,” Henry Venn of CMS found a son with whom he had more in common than with his own son, John. See Carus (1847), 23.

19. Hylson-Smith (1988), 19.

20. “They are a rope of sand, and such they will continue.” John Wesley used this expression on 4 August 1769, when he gave up his hope of turning the movement into a formal organization. See Wesley (1831), 305. On the influence of Evangelicalism—especially its “call to seriousness”—in Britain, see, for example, Balleine (1908); Bebbington (1989); I. Bradley (1976); Hilton (1988); Hylson-Smith (1988); and Rosman (1984). See also J. Venn (of Clapham) (1804).

21. Shenk (2006 [1983]), 2. For accounts of the origins and influence of the Clapham Sect, see Telford (1907); and Tomkins (2010).

22. Kuper (2009), 151.

23. The locus classicus of the term “intellectual aristocracy” is Annan (1955). About the Clapham-Bloomsbury connection, see, for example, Himmelfarb (1985). For a discussion of the influence of Evangelicalism on the long tradition of autobiographical writing, see Dahl (1983); and Peterson (1986).

24. See John Venn of Clapham, in Emelia and Catherine Venn’s “Accounts of illness and death of John Venn 11–29 June 1813,” CMS Venn, F6; John Venn of Clapham, in “B. U.” (1813), 479; Hennell (1958), 159.

25. William Farish, Professor of Chemistry (1794–1813) and Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy (1813–37) at Cambridge, married Hannah Stephen, sister of James Stephen senior, the father of James Stephen junior, who was Henry Venn of CMS’s brother-in-law. Where Farish supervised Henry Venn’s mathematical studies, Henry Venn Elliott, the son of Henry Venn’s father’s sister Emelia, supervised his study of classics.

26. Carter (2016 [2001]), 2. Although the Evangelical revival had been “cradled in the Church of England, its relationship to its mother Church was not always an easy one. From the outset, its presence aroused hostility. There were persistent claims that Evangelicals were suspect as churchmen; that they were half-hearted in their attachment to the Establishment, if not downright disloyal.” Carter (2016 [2001]), 1.

27. R. B. Seeley quoted in Venn and Venn (1880), 26.

28. Venn and Venn (1880), 41.

29. Venn and Venn (1880), 44.

30. Venn (1904a), 163.

31. Venn and Venn (1880), 62.

32. Henry Venn of CMS quoted in Venn and Venn (1880), 61.

33. Henry Venn of CMS quoted in Venn and Venn (1880), 61.

34. See Venn, “Annals,” 12.

35. Venn (1904a), 163.

36. See Venn (1904a), 163; Venn, “Annals,” 12–15.

37. Henry Venn of CMS quoted in Venn (1904a), 162.

38. Lewis (1842), 299.

39. A detailed description and drawing of the school is found in the British Almanac of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (1837), 236–37; and in Lewis (1842), 299–300. The Venns reportedly built the school in memory of Martha Venn’s sister Anne Sykes, who had lived with them from the time of their marriage and who died of tuberculosis in 1835.

40. Jalland and Rosman have argued that Victorian Evangelicalism made its greatest impact in the sphere of family life and values by idealizing the family as a divine institution in which religion and the family were mutually reinforcing. See Jalland (1996), 2; Rosman (1984), 97.

41. See, for example, Henry Venn of CMS to Martha Venn, 20 October 1834, CMS Venn, C32.

42. Henry Venn of CMS to Martha Venn, 20 November 1835, CMS Venn, C32. The Complete Duty of Man went through multiple editions into the nineteenth century, including one in the late 1830s, edited with an introduction by Henry Venn of CMS. John Venn of Clapham began work on a biography of his father, Henry Venn of Huddersfield, which he left for his son, Henry Venn of CMS, to complete. Henry Venn of CMS himself published two sermons that emphasized the importance of family religion and the religious responsibilities of family members to each other. See H. Venn (of Huddersfield) (1838 [1763]); H. Venn (of CMS) and J. Venn (of Hereford) (1834); and H. Venn (of CMS) and Mackenzie (1863).

43. See Henry Venn of CMS to Martha Venn, 7 October 1838, CMS Venn, C32. Martha Venn’s importance in Venn’s upbringing illustrates an element of the Evangelical family to which Tolley (1997) has given little emphasis: the impact of the role of women.

44. Charles Simeon to a father, 17 July 1823, cited in Hilton (1988), 12.

45. “Notebook about children, 1838–1844,” CMS Venn, F22. Martha Venn began the diary in 1838. Henry Venn continued it after 1839.

46. Hannah More “quoted with approval” by William Wilberforce in W. Wilberforce (1834), 197.

47. See, for example, L. Stephen (1895), 62.

48. William Wilberforce and James Stephen quoted in Tolley (1997), 28.

49. Henry Venn of CMS, “Notes about Henrietta, John and Henry Venn when they were children, partly by their mother Martha and partly by their father H. V. (1838–1844),” CMS Venn, F22.

50. Henry Venn of CMS, “Notes about Henrietta, John and Henry Venn when they were children, partly by their mother Martha and partly by their father H. V. (1838–1844),” CMS Venn, F22.

51. See, for example, Henry Venn of CMS to Henrietta Venn, undated, CMS Venn, C33/2. As Tolley (1997), 28, has noted, Fitzjames Stephen was brought to family worship and taught to pray well before the age of two.

52. H. Venn (of Huddersfield) (1838 [1763]), 291.

53. H. Venn (of Huddersfield) (1838 [1763]), 291.

54. H. Venn (of Huddersfield) (1838 [1763]), 291.

55. Venn, “Annals,” 2.

56. Venn, “Annals,” 2. Henry and Martha Venn’s relaxation had consisted of driving tours to the south of England, where most of their friends and relatives lived. Like his father and grandfather, Henry Venn kept diaries on his journeys, reporting the various inns and choice of roads, and was always able to remember and describe all places mentioned by his children. See Venn (1880d and 1880e); Venn (1904a), 161–62; and Henry Venn, “Travel accounts, including notes of inns and road expenses (1830–1840),” CMS Venn, F40. As Henry Venn wrote in a letter two days after Martha Venn had died: “There was ‘perfect peace,’ not a care for husband, children, all was cast upon the Lord . . . so that I could only look upon her as a wounded victor in possession of the field, and the enemy out of sight.” Henry Venn of CMS quoted in Venn and Venn (1880), 84.

57. Venn (1904a), 162. See also Venn, “Annals,” 2–3.

58. “Diary, 1818–1840,” CMS Venn, F11.

59. “Account of death of Martha, wife of H. V. by H. V., 1840,” CMS Venn, F18.

60. “Unfinished paper from Martha Venn to her children, 12 December 1839,” CMS Venn, C33.

61. See, for example, Jalland (1996); and Riso (2015).

62. “Diary, 1818–1840,” 10 March 1840, CMS Venn, F11. As Henry Venn of Huddersfield explained in his Complete Duty of Man, a young child had to be made aware of the goodness of God; then, as the child matured, the doctrines of man’s corruption became important.

63. Clewlow (2007), 25. See “Unfinished paper from Martha Venn to her children, 12 December 1839,” CMS Venn, C33; and “Account of death of Martha, wife of H. V. by H. V., 1840,” 12 December 1839, CMS Venn, C33. As Henry Venn of Huddersfield wrote in The Complete Duty of Man: “you should be careful to instruct your children what is meant by the news just brought to their ears, Such a one is dead. Then assure them that to die is to pass out of a changing world into one unchangeable: . . . that to every one who has loved God, and lived and believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, death is the door to endless joys and the perfection of glory.” H. Venn (of Huddersfield) (1838 [1763]), 294–95.

64. See Henry Venn of CMS to his children, 7 July 1853, CMS Venn, C34; H. Venn (of Huddersfield) (1838 [1763]), 295.

65. Henry Venn of CMS to his children, 29 July 1841, CMS Venn, C33.

66. Henry Venn of CMS to his children, 29 July 1841, CMS Venn, C33.

67. See Jalland (1996), 21.

68. “Diary, 1818–1840,” 26 January 1840, CMS Venn, F11.

69. Venn, “Annals,” 6.

70. John Venn to Laura Forster, 7 January 1907, SGL Venn; Venn, “Annals,” 2.

71. John Venn to Laura Forster, 7 January 1907, SGL Venn.

72. John Venn to Laura Forster, 4 August 1918, SGL Venn. Marianne Thornton (1797–1887) was the eldest child of Henry Thornton and Marianne Sykes; Venn’s mother, Martha Venn, was the daughter of Marianne Sykes’s brother Nicholas Sykes.

73. John Venn to Laura Forster, 4 August 1918, SGL Venn.

74. Stock (1899), 369.

75. Clewlow (2007), 28. See, for example, Henry Venn of CMS to his children, 29 April 1841, 3 November 1843, CMS Venn, C33.

76. “Notebook about children, 1838–1844,” 14 May 1843, CMS Venn, F22.

77. Henry Venn of CMS to his children, 13 July 1841, CMS Venn, C33. The Venn children were given the responsibility of reading prayers to each other around 1848–49.

78. Henry Venn of CMS to his children, 23 July 1854.

79. See Stockton (1980), 315.

80. See Clewlow (2007), 30.

81. Venn (1904a), 174.

82. Venn, “Annals,” 39.

83. See Clewlow (2007), 32.

84. See Clewlow (2007), 33.

85. Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 2 August 1861, CMS Venn, C34.

86. Venn, “Annals,” 16. “And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself” (Genesis 3:10, KJV).

87. Venn, “Annals,” 38.

88. Venn, “Annals,” 16.

89. Venn, “Annals,” 38.

90. John Venn to Laura Forster, 7 January 1907, SGL Venn. See also Venn (1904a), 169. Englander (1988) provides a discussion of Evangelicalism in the Victorian household.

91. Venn (1904a), 169.

92. Venn, “Annals,” 28.

93. Venn, “Annals,” 27–28, see also Venn (1904a), 169–70.

94. Venn, “Annals,” 28. As H. T. Francis recalled: “Venn was ignorant of the very name of Shelley until he heard a debate on this unknown poet at the Union Society.” Francis (1923), 104.

95. See Rosman (1984), 178–93.

96. Venn, “Annals,” 17, 20, 22.

97. Venn, “Annals,” 9, 15.

98. Venn, “Annals,” 15.

99. See Venn, “Annals,” 3; Leslie Stephen to John Venn, 2 September 1902, GCA, Venn Papers, C12/4; L. Stephen (1895), 86.

100. Venn, “Annals,” 9, 10.

101. See “Brief notes of places visited 1857–1900,” CMS Venn, F28.

102. See Venn, “Annals,” 4; and Venn, “Brief notes of places visited 1857–1900,” CMS Venn, F28. Emelia Russell Gurney, born in 1823 as the daughter of Samuel Ellis Batten and Henry Venn’s sister Caroline Venn, married Russell Gurney in 1852. An active campaigner for women’s higher education, she (anonymously) published several books, including Dante’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1897).

103. See Venn, “Annals,” 7–8.

104. See Venn (1904a), 143; Venn, “Annals,” 6.

105. Venn (1904a), 144.

106. Venn, “Annals,” 9.

107. Venn (1904a), 143–44.

108. “A visit to the field of Waterloo in August, 1815 (1902),” CMS Venn, MSS F52 copied, by Venn, from Emelia Venn’s shorthand diary “Detailed diary of tour in France, Belgium and Switzerland (1815),” CMS Venn, F9.

109. Venn (1904a), 143; Venn, “Annals,” 9.

110. Venn, “Annals,” 8.

111. Venn, “Annals,” 8.

112. See Schools Inquiry Commission (1868), 34–35.

113. On the Oxford movement see, for instance, Brad Faught (2003).

114. Venn, “Annals,” 11. See Schools Inquiry Commission (1868), 34.

115. Venn (1904a), 166. Venn remembered the move with distaste, mainly regretting the loss of the Highbury Garden. “The so-called ‘garden’ attached to the new house seemed to us a mere yard in comparison with the varied four acres which we had left. All chance of cricket or of other games was lost, and when we tried a walk, which my father continued for years to do on Saturdays, we found that practically there was but one line of exit towards any pretense of hedges and green fields.” Venn (1904), 166–67; see also Venn, “Annals,” 16–17.

116. See Clewlow (2007), 37.

117. See Venn, “Annals,” 26.

118. Venn, “Annals,” 17–18.

119. Venn, “Annals,” 17–18.

120. Venn, “Annals,” 28, 23. As Venn explained: “As it was he had not a notion of treating the youth who was to go into the counting house at 16 in any different way from what he thought best for those who were to enter Oxford at 19” (Venn, “Annals,” 24).

121. Venn, “Annals,” 19, 22.

122. Venn, “Annals,” 23. During four years spent as a fellow of St. John’s, Cambridge, the colorful mathematician, theologian, and bishop of Natal John Colenso published several highly successful and widely used mathematics books, one of which was The Elements of Algebra, Designed for the Use of Schools (1841).

123. See Venn, “Annals,” 23, 26.

124. Venn, “Annals,” 23.

125. Venn, “Annals,” 23–25. As Venn here added: “Any little taste he [Coombe] may have once had for the subject had apparently been driven out of him by the time he came to teach us.” Coombe had graduated nineteenth wrangler in the 1845 Mathematical Tripos.

126. See Venn, “Annals,” 26. At least for some time, Islington Proprietary partly adopted the so-called Madras system of education, wherein education was imparted by older and abler pupils educating younger pupils as helpers to the teachers.

127. The others were Cornelius Witherby and Charles Holland Hoole.

128. Venn, “Annals,” 31.

129. Venn, “Annals,” 18, 25.

130. Susanna C. Venn, “Autobiographical notes 1844–67, from birth to marriage (1885),” CMS Venn, F30; and Venn, “Annals,” 14, 15.

131. See Venn, “Annals,” 17, 25, 20.

132. See Venn, “Annals,” 20.

133. See Venn, “Annals,” 19.

134. Venn, “Annals,” 19.

135. See Venn, “Annals,” 21.

136. See Venn, “Annals,” 21.

137. See Venn (1904a), 116.

138. Venn (1904a), 121.

139. Venn (1904a), 121. These instruments eventually came into the possession of Venn.

140. John Venn of Clapham to Francis J. H. Wollaston, 15 June 1789, quoted in Hennell (1958), 52. See the essays in D. N. Livingstone, Hart, and Noll (1999) for a revisionary account of the “pugilistic language of warfare, struggle, and conflict” (Livingstone, Hart and Noll [1999], 3), in which the few studies on the encounters between Evangelicalism and science have often been cast.

141. Venn (1904a), 171.

142. Venn, “Annals,” 29.

143. Venn, “Annals,” 30.

144. Venn, “Annals,” 31.

145. See, for example, Knoepflmacher and Tennyson (1977) for a collection of accounts of the awareness of, and responses to, nature of other Victorians.

146. See Venn, “Annals,” 30, 31.

147. Venn, “Annals,” 33, 39. The Dairyman’s Daughter, a booklet written by Legh Richmond, curate of Baring, and issued in tract form by the Religious Tract Society, described the religious experience of Elizabeth Wallbridge, who was born, lived, and died in Arreton, Isle of Wight. It soon had a wide circulation, reaching four million copies around 1830, and its popularity led many to make the pilgrimage to Arreton, including Queen Victoria, whose summer house, Osborne, was less than ten miles from that place. See, for example, K. Roberts (2006) for an account of the “roots and routs” of this staple of nineteenth-century Evangelicalism.

148. Venn, “Annals,” 23, 24.

149. Clewlow (2007), 40.

Chapter 2

1. Venn and Venn (1922a), xvii.

2. See Brooke (1985), 230–32; Venn (1897), xxv; J. A. Venn (1954), 284.

3. See Venn, “Annals,” 35.

4. See Searby (1997), 325. Clayton’s tutorship coincided with the mastership of Edwin Guest, who also entertained Evangelical sympathies. However, it was with Clayton’s name, not that of the master or the deans who oversaw religious discipline at Caius, that this period in the college’s history came to be associated.

5. Venn’s autobiographical annals were not written for publication, but the recollections of his student days formed the basis for a publication in Caian (Venn [1905]), reproduced as a chapter in Early Collegiate Life (Venn [1913], chapter 13). This chapter in turn has formed the basis of a similar chapter in the published history of Gonville and Caius College (Brooke [1985], 218–22) and has been used as evidence in Brooke (1993), xv–xvii, 82–83.

6. See Henry Venn to John Venn, 9 December 1856, CMS Venn, C34/29 and Venn, “Annals,” 35.

7. Cornelius Witherby (1852), Charles Holland Hoole (1854), and William Berkley (1856) each won Islington Scholarships, which were of the value of £30 per annum and tenable for four years at any college or hall in Oxford (see Islington Proprietary School, 3). Witherby studied at Lincoln College, Oxford, and Hoole at Christ Church, Oxford; Berkley, for his part, become fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, and vicar of Navestock.

8. Venn (1901a), 223.

9. Venn (1913), 269.

10. Brooke (1985), 220.

11. See Francis (1923), 104–5; Venn (1901b), 232–35.

12. Venn (1901a), 143; Brooke (1985), 218; Venn (1913), 263. Privately, Venn was disappointed that Clayton found little time to guide his students except “as to what church I had better attend or avoid.” Publicly, Venn defended Clayton on the grounds that the demands of that position of influence meant that much of his time was taken up with party matters. As Venn emphasized, even the limited contact that Clayton had with his students were unusual for resident fellows and clergy of the 1850s. See Venn (1913), 259; and Venn, “Annals,” 92.

13. The Caius College Statutes imposed a requirement of daily “common prayers,” observed through a regime of compulsory chapel for all students. As Clewlow has pointed out, the regular attendance at college chapel was upheld both on religious grounds and as an important part of the general disciplinary structure of the college alongside attendance of dinner in hall and observance of the curfew (Clewlow [2007], 45). See also Excerpta e Statutis Collegii de Gonville et Caius, 1843. The religious and community-building functions of religious observance, which were closely linked, have been identified as a significant unifying factor among nineteenth-century clergy, and shared experience, texts, and rituals as an underpinning to the formation of an intellectual elite. See, for example, Haig (1984), 27; Newsome (1961), 4–12; Slinn (2017), chapter 3. See also chapter 12 in this book.

14. Venn, “Annals,” 45.

15. See Venn (1913), 270.

16. Venn (1913), 268. The testimonials required from the college by a bishop prior to ordination were said to be drawn up on the basis of the student’s record of attendance of chapel and Communion, hall and lectures, and observance of the curfew. See Clewlow (2007), 46, based on Excerpta e Statutis Collegii de Gonville et Caius (1843), Rules of College XII.

17. Of these thirty-three students, seventeen were to be ordained and hold some sort of curacy. See Clewlow (2007), 46, based on information drawn from Venn (1898).

18. Venn (1913), 268.

19. Venn, “Annals,” 37.

20. Venn, “Annals,” 37.

21. Venn, “Annals,” 35. Venn’s reference to a transition that took place in Evangelicalism from a small group pre-1830s to a narrow party post-1860s has been duly recognized, for example, by I. Bradley (1976), 70–72; and Toon (1979), 16–77.

22. Venn, “Annals,” 39, 35, 36.

23. Venn, “Annals,” 35.

24. See Francis (1923), 119.

25. Venn, “Annals,” 70. See also Venn, “Annals,” 90; and Venn (1913), 259.

26. Venn, “Annals,” 69, 68.

27. Venn, “Annals,” 68. Caius’s reputation for Evangelicalism, the evidence for which would be largely provided by Venn himself, has disguised to a certain extent the diversity of religious opinion that coexisted within the college (cf. Brooke [1985], 218–22; Brooke [1993], xv–xvii, 82–83). At the end of the 1850s, Venn would, for example, witness the contempt with which certain of the fellows, like Norman Ferrers, regarded Clayton’s religion (see Venn, “Annals,” 76).

28. L. Stephen (1895), 33. As will be made clear in chapter 7, the Venn name remained synonymous in public estimation with the Evangelical party, not only as a result of the reputation of the Clapham connection but also through Henry and John Venn’s continued association with Evangelical ideas, causes, and associations in pulpit, and via public platforms such as the CMS and the Christian Observer.

29. See Venn, “Annals,” 37.

30. Francis (1923), 119.

31. Venn (1904a), 187.

32. As part of the extremely sympathetic characterization of his tutor, Venn made an exception for Clayton himself. According to Venn, Clayton was not only “a very kind-hearted and worthy man,” but, unlike some of the serious and narrow young men that his reputation was attracting to the college, also not an extreme Evangelical. See Venn, “Annals,” 39; Venn (1913), 263.

33. Venn, “Annals,” 35–36, 37.

34. Clewlow (2007), 59–60.

35. Clewlow (2007), 60.

36. See Venn, “Annals,” 35–36.

37. Venn, “Annals,” 37.

38. Venn, “Annals,” 37. Among Venn’s other friends were William Wilberforce Gedge, Joseph Gould, and D. B. Panton. Where Gedge, who was of impeccable Evangelical pedigree, was to offer himself as a missionary, others, like Garrick and Gould, went on to conventional careers as parish clergymen.

39. Venn, “Annals,” 41. As Venn explained: “Lawn tennis and croquet were unborn. Real tennis and hunting were of course confined to the wealthy few. Hockey and football were left to boys” (Venn [1913], 280).

40. Venn, “Annals,” 42–43.

41. See Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 6 February 1858, 9 December 1856, CMS Venn, C34/35, C34/29.

42. Venn, “Annals,” 46.

43. Venn (1913), 258.

44. Venn (1913), 263.

45. Venn (1913), 257.

46. Venn (1913), 257. Venn referred to the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics George Gabriel Stokes’s lectures on physical optics, which he attended in the May term of 1856, when “an assistant followed [Stokes] with a heliostat, a prism, and one or two similar articles, which were placed on the table, and removed at the end of the lecture” (Venn [1913], 264). In more recent years, historians have referred to these and similar endeavors to question the idea that there was little science or science teaching done at Cambridge prior to the 1850s. See, for example, Becher (1986); and Sviedrys (1970).

47. Venn (1913), 258.

48. See Barrow-Green (2001), 178. Venn’s mathematical lecturers at Caius were Joseph Morrison Croker (eighth wrangler, 1840) and Charles Frederick Mackenzie (second wrangler, 1848).

49. See Craik (2008), chapters 1, 5, and 6, about Hopkins’s work and influence, and Warwick (2003), chapter 2, for an account of the role of private tutors, such as Hopkins, in the development of mathematics in Victorian Cambridge. Hopkins had been the senior wrangler in the 1827 Mathematical Tripos.

50. Venn, “Annals,” 39, 55, 48. Craik has drawn attention to the fact that the case of Venn arose toward the end of Hopkins, “when his success was declining” (Craik [2008], 109). Venn, for his part, emphasized that fact: Hopkins “had not taken freshmen [before], but narrowed means (the result of some unsuccessful investments) now induced him to do so” (Venn, “Annals,” 47). More generally, as Barrow-Green writes, since “the coach’s reputation, and thus income, depended solely on his pupils’ positions in the examination, it was not in a coach’s interest for a student to spend time studying outside the Tripos subjects” (Barrow-Green [2001], 178).

51. By his will of 27 September 1615, Stephen Perse founded a free grammar school (Perse School) in Cambridge as well as six scholarships and six fellowships at Caius College. As to these scholarships, preference in the election, by the master and four senior fellows, was given to scholars from the Perse School. See Schools Inquiry Commission (1868), 475–81.

52. See Venn (1901a), 83. See Willis (1886), 313–18, for full architectural details.

53. Venn, “Annals,” 58. The “Crimean winter” refers to the siege of Sebastopol, which lasted from October 1854 until September 1855, during the Crimean War between Russia and an alliance made up of the United Kingdom, France, and other allies.

54. Venn, “Annals,” 55.

55. Brooke (1993), 309.

56. Winstanley (1947), 144; Francis (1923), 110. About Paley, Venn recalled that he “never had a word of lecture upon him, and never saw a ‘tip’ or sheet, beyond a few hints in the way of memoria technica, which tradition has doubtless handed on. Perhaps it was due to this mode of treatment that I found the book decidedly interesting, and still retain more than a lingering liking for Paley” (Venn [1913], 265). Venn’s comment seems to confirm that theology formed “a relatively minor part of the formal curriculum” in mid-nineteenth-century Cambridge (Fyfe [1997], 321).

57. Francis James Jameson (1828–69), sixth wrangler in 1850, fellow of Caius 1852–55, fellow of St. Catherine’s 1855–62, and vicar of Coton, Cambridge, 1862–69.

58. Venn, “Annals,” 56. As Venn explained: “[I] selected a Mr Jameson, a fellow of the College, of whom I heard a good account from Garrick. . . . It is perhaps characteristic that I did not ask any one’s advice in the matter” (Venn, “Annals,” 55–56).

59. Isaac Todhunter (1820–84), BA in 1842, MA in 1844, senior wrangler in 1848, and fellow of St. John’s College (1849–64).

60. L. Stephen (1865), 107.

61. Venn, “Annals,” 60, 60–61. The following two examples may count as evidence for Todhunter’s taste for speculative knowledge; in 1846, he won a prize for an essay on the doctrine of divine providence, and in 1877 his sixteenth and final textbook, Natural Philosophy for Beginners, appeared.

62. Venn, “Annals,” 56.

63. See Warwick (2003), chapter 6, for an account of the physical side of the tripos examination.

64. See Gascoigne (1984) for an account of the formation of the Mathematical Tripos in the eighteenth century.

65. See Rouse Ball (1918), 294–300; and Winstanley (1940), 158, for details.

66. See Becher (1980), 6.

67. Becher (1980), 3.

68. Venn, “Annals,” 88.

69. See Venn, “Annals,” 61. Garrick, who coached with Jameson, had finished one place below Venn in the May examinations of 1854 and afterward was somewhat gaining on Venn.

70. Venn, “Annals,” 62.

71. Venn, “Annals,” 62.

72. Venn, “Annals,” 71, 72. When Venn began his fourth year of residence he was what was then still called a “questionist.” Following medieval practice, “a Cambridge bachelor of arts was not admitted, as now, ad gradum baccalaurei in artibus; he was admitted ad respondendum quaestioni” (Baker [1986], 9).

73. See Cambridge Examination Papers (1857), 43–77.

74. John Venn to Henry Venn of CMS, 9 January 1857, CMS Venn, C40/6.

75. The content of the Mathematical Tripos had altered greatly in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, with the introduction of the Continental version of the calculus to Cambridge (see, e.g., Enros [1983]; Phillips [2006]; Wilkes [1990]). In the following decades, its character continued to change as Cambridge men such as William Whewell and George Biddell Airy evaluated the initial changes and made additional adjustments (see, e.g., Becher [1980]; M. Fisch [1994]). By the early 1850s the Mathematical Tripos “was more geometrical and less analytical than it had been in previous decades, and it rewarded physical intuition more than mathematical rigor.” D. B. Wilson (1982), 326.

76. This student was Thomas Skelton. Gerard Brown Finch of Queens’ College was the senior wrangler; he subsequently finished second in the Smith’s Prize, became a fellow and honorary fellow of his college, respectively, in 1857 and 1886. See, for example, Brock and Price (1980) and Warwick (1998) for accounts of the material culture of mathematical training in nineteenth-century Cambridge, and Stray (2005) for an account of the shift from oral to written examinations at Cambridge and Oxford.

77. Venn, “Annals,” 73.

78. Venn, “Annals,” 73. See Warwick (2003), chapter 5, for a discussion of Routh’s and Frost’s methods of tuition. As Venn reminisced: “We selected our coaches by mutual advice and [by] comparison we decided for ourselves what line of studies we would follow” (Venn [1913], 263).

79. Venn, “Annals,” 75.

80. Venn, “Annals,” 74.

81. The Smith’s Prize, an important mathematical competition, established in Cambridge in 1768 by the will of Robert Smith, for ambitious Cambridge wranglers. See Barrow-Green (1999) for the history and legacy of the Smith’s Prize.

82. Venn, “Annals,” 74, 88.

83. Venn, “Annals,” 77.

84. Venn (1901a), 208. As Venn here wrote, in 1809 “the fellowship has been converted from the support of a resident student for work which he is expected to do, to a pension for work which he has done.” Whereas from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century junior fellows were required to reside in college for at least several months a year, in 1809 their nonresidence was permitted. See Brooke (1985), 96–98, for the history of the Caian distinction between “senior” and “junior” fellows, which traces back to the late sixteenth century.

85. Venn, “Annals,” 75, 76.

86. Venn, “Annals,” 87.

87. Venn, “Annals,” 87.

Chapter 3

1. See Venn, “Annals,” 64–65.

2. See Venn, “Annals,” 64.

3. Henry Venn of CMS to Venn, 19 July 1856, CMS Venn, C34/28.

4. See Clewlow (2007), 56.

5. Altholz (1982), 186; Venn, “Annals,” 68.

6. See Brooke (1983), chapter 12; Searby (1997), chapters 11–13; and Venn (1901a), 149–50. As Venn himself wrote: “The [Royal] Commission reported in 1852; and in 1856 a Parliamentary Commission was appointed, with power to deal with both the University and the individual colleges. The Commissioners . . . did not endeavor to force one rigid system upon all the colleges, but allowed the latter to take the initiative with a draft of their proposed statutes. These were submitted to them, and, after mutual discussion, amended and modified until final agreement was reached. This discussion lasted during a considerable part of the years 1858 and 1859. The new code of Statutes, in our case, came into operation on June 30, 1860” (Venn [1901a], 149–50).

7. At Caius, two-thirds of fellowships were open to laymen. Nonetheless, clerical fellows of sufficient seniority were able to count on the continuation of their fellowships until they had the option of a college living. Caius had almost twenty livings within its gift, which were in effect pensions for clerical fellows, providing an alternative means of support to those who wished to marry. See Clewlow (2007), 67, who derives the information from Status of Gonville and Caius College (1860), Statute 15 of Fellows, Duties and Conditions of Tenure.

8. Venn (1913), 267–68.

9. Venn, “Annals,” 70; Venn (1913), 269.

10. Venn, “Annals,” 93.

11. It has been estimated that 87 percent of fellowships in Cambridge imposed on their holders the obligation to take Holy Orders within a number of years of election. At some colleges, such as Corpus Christi and Magdalene, the rule applied to all fellows, whereas at Caius two-thirds of fellowships were open to laymen, though many of the total of twenty-nine so-called foundation and bye fellowships came with other restrictions nourished by the loyalties of the benefactors. See Searby (1997), 100.

12. Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 19 July 1856, 12 March 1858, CMS Venn, C34/28, C34/37.

13. Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 20 February 1858, CMS Venn, C34/36.

14. Venn, “Annals,” 72–73.

15. Venn, “Annals,” 73. Missionary enthusiasm at Cambridge was not confined to the Evangelicals, nor was it specific to Caius and to Clayton’s tutorship, but it was, of course, particularly pertinent to the son of the honorary secretary to the CMS. Henry Venn often urged his son to send accounts of the speakers he heard at missionary meetings in the university, and in late 1857 Venn attended a meeting addressed by David Livingstone that made a great impression on the undergraduates and marked the start of a period of great enthusiasm for overseas mission in the university. In fact, the address prompted the establishment of the Cambridge University Church Missionary Union in 1858.

16. See Venn, “Annals,” 92–93.

17. Searby (1997), 262.

18. See, for example, Garland (1980) on the history of the ideal of a liberal education at Cambridge between 1800 and 1860.

19. Venn (1913), 257. For the examination on Paley, Venn relied solely on his own reading; he would later be unable to recall receiving any lectures on the Evidences (see Venn [1913], 257).

20. The “Voluntary Theological Examination” survived under the auspices of the newly established Board of Theological Studies until a specialist Theological Tripos was introduced in 1873 and separate clerical training colleges were established in the 1880s. See Bullock (1955), 80–81.

21. Dowland (1997), 183. See also Winstanley (1947), 168–74.

22. Venn, “Annals,” 91.

23. See Clewlow (2007), 68.

24. Venn, “Annals,” 90–91.

25. Venn, “Annals,” 91.

26. Venn, “Annals,” 91, 92. As Venn himself suggested, his situation was not a unique product of the early Victorian system. See, in this regard, Heeney (1976), 98. Around the time of Venn’s ordination, some small steps that were beginning to be taken, but, as Clewlow puts it, “It was only as the Anglican monopoly of the University was broken that a departure was made from the generalist, non-professional model, and Cambridge became a centre of specialist theological study” (Clewlow [2007], 69–70).

27. This is borne out solely by Venn’s unpublished “Annals,” where he focused on a departure from clerical status rather than its original adoption. There are no surviving letters from Venn for this period to illuminate his exact position.

28. Henry Venn of CMS to Henrietta Venn, 14 November 1858, CMS Venn, C34/38; Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 22 October 1862, CMS Venn, C34/87.

29. See Raven (1953), “Notes.” As Raven shows, this dictum gave expression to the then deeply held belief at English universities in the difference between academic and vocational training.

30. Venn, “Annals,” 93.

31. Venn, “Annals,” 93–94.

32. Venn, “Annals,” 95.

33. Venn’s case illustrates Bullock’s suggestion that the dominating person in the life of the ordinand was usually the father. See Bullock (1955), 144.

34. Venn, “Annals,” 94; Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 25 November 1858, 22 January 1859, 2 April 1859, CMS Venn, C34/39, C34/43, C34/54.

35. Venn, “Annals,” 100. Tilson March was the son of William Marsh, a follower of Simeon and an old acquaintance of Henry Venn; his sister, Catherine Marsh, was known as a writer and outspoken advocate of Evangelicalism.

36. See Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 16 June 1860, 2 August 1860, CMS Venn, C34/73, C34/78.

37. Venn, “Annals,” 104.

38. See Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 16 June 1860, CMS Venn, C34/73.

39. Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 16 June 1860, CMS Venn, C34/73.

40. John Venn to Henry Venn of CMS, 14 June 1860, CMS Venn, C40/9.

41. Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 2 August 1860, CMS Venn, C34/78.

42. John Venn to Henry Venn of CMS, September 1858, CMS Venn, C34/7, Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 2 August 1860, CMS Venn, C34/78.

43. Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 11 September 1860, CMS Venn, C34/80.

44. Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 11 September 1860, CMS Venn, C34/80.

45. Venn, “Annals,” 105–6.

46. Venn, “Annals,” 107.

47. Venn, “Annals,” 107.

48. Venn, “Annals,” 107. As Venn added on this same page: “I used to reckon that if they had been given their choice 9 out of 10 of those present would have walked straight out of the Church.”

49. Venn, “Annals,” 107.

50. Venn, “Annals,” 107.

51. The intellectual influence of Venn’s reading in these years is the topic of chapter 4.

52. Venn, “Annals,” 94.

53. Venn, “Annals,” 91, 93, 95.

54. Venn, “Annals,” 95.

55. Venn (1913), 265; Venn, “Annals,” 97. McCosh’s Method of the Divine Government put forward an “argument from design” for a pre-Darwinian natural theology, that is, a conception of creation somewhat similar to but more thoroughly organic than those of Butler and Paley. The natural theology of figures such as Butler, Paley, and McCosh was “natural” because the evidence was taken from direct observation of the natural world or from recent scientific observations. It was “theological” because the evidence was interpreted in light of the attributes of God laid out in the Bible and in Christian doctrine (see Eddy [2013], 100). McCosh, a follower of the Scottish Common Sense philosophy of Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, and others, combined “Protestant evangelicalism, for which he prepared a philosophical foundation, and evolutionary science, which he set in a theistic framework” (Hoeveler [1983], ix).

56. L. Stephen (1903), 9. For accounts of the context and legacy of the debate, see, for example, Freeman (1969); J. C. Livingstone (1985); and Reardon (1980), chapter 7.

57. Venn, “Annals,” 96.

58. Venn, “Annals,” 113. The quote cited by Venn was by William Jowett, one of the six contributors to Essays and Reviews.

59. Venn, “Annals,” 99.

60. See Coleridge (1839 [1825]), xxiv. Venn’s Hulsean Lectures are discussed in chapter 8.

61. Venn (1895a), 164. As Venn explained their connection: “I did not know [Seeley] as an undergraduate, though we were of the same year. . . . I first made his acquaintance in 1860, at Mortlake. I was then curate there, and his family resided in the parish. . . . In 1861 he came to live in the parish, having just left Cambridge and taken a classical mastership in his old school, the City of London” (Venn [1895a], 164–65).

62. See, for example, Pals (1977) and Hesketh (2017) for discussions of the reception of Seeley’s Ecce Homo.

63. Venn, “Annals,” 110.

64. Venn (1895a), 167. Venn was one of Seeley’s friends who knew about the secret of his authorship of Ecce Homo and who was apparently unbothered by the white lies that went along with being a part of the secret. See Hesketh (2017), chapter 9, for details.

65. Venn, “Annals,” 131.

66. Venn, “Annals,” 109.

67. Venn, “Annals,” 92.

68. Venn, “Annals,” 104.

69. Venn, “Annals,” 104.

70. See Venn, “Annals,” 77. The Victorian crisis of faith, or age of doubt, has been abundantly documented. See, for example, Helmstadter and Lightman (1990); Larsen (2006); Lane (2011); Parsons (1988a).

71. Venn, “Annals,” 105.

72. Venn, “Annals,” 95, 96, 102.

73. Clewlow (2007), 89.

74. Venn, “Annals,” 117.

75. Venn, “Annals,” 120.

76. Venn, “Annals,” 120. The explanation of verbal inspiration appearing within parentheses was added by Venn in a footnote in which he referred to one of Manley’s sermons at Mortlake.

77. Venn, “Annals,” 120.

78. Venn, “Annals,” 98.

79. Altholz (1994), ix.

80. When Essays and Reviews appeared, in March 1860, it was largely ignored; only with the review in Westminster Review, of October 1860, was it brought before a national readership. Once the article appeared, “everything exploded” (Cashdollar [1989], 87). There exist two major monographs on Essays and Reviews by specialists in Victorian ecclesiastical history: I. Ellis (1980); and Altholz (1994). See Shea and Whitla (2000) for an edition of the original text and reception.

81. Parsons (1988b), 197; Harrison (1860), 295.

82. S. Wilberforce (1861), 302.

83. Venn, “Annals,” 111.

84. Temple et al. (2013 [1860]), “To the reader” (n.p.). See Clewlow (2007) for this suggestion.

85. Venn, “Annals,” 113. Venn found a similar “hermeneutic” outlook in two other theological books that he was reading at the time: Edward Strachey’s Hebrew Politics [not Polity, as Venn himself wrote in his “Annals”] in the Times of Sargon and Sennarcherib: An Inquiry into the Historical Meaning and Purpose of the Prophecies of Isaiah (1853) and Thomas Hughes’s Tracts for Priests and People (1861). Hughes was actually one of several authors collected in the two-volume Tracts, though his “Religio laici” was the first essay in it. I would like to thank Christopher Stray for bringing this to my attention.

86. See Venn, “Annals,” 92.

87. “Septem contra Christum” was modeled on “Septem contra Thebas,” by Aeschylus. See Altholz (1982) for an account of the Anglican responses to Essays and Reviews.

88. Venn, “Annals,” 111.

89. Venn, “Annals,” 112.

90. Venn, “Annals,” 111–12.

91. See Clewlow (2007), 91; Venn, “Annals,” 112; and Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 2 April 1859, CMS Venn, C34/54.

92. For example, as a barrister Fitzjames Stephen conducted a successful defense of one of the Essayists, Rowland Williams, in the Arches’ Court of Canterbury on the grounds that the question was not one of the correctness of the opinions but rather whether Williams was forbidden from expressing them as a clergyman. See J. F. Stephen (1862); and Colaiaco (1983), 172–75.

93. Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 5 November 1862, CMS Venn, C34/88; John Venn to Henry Venn of CMS, 7 November 1862, CMS Venn, C40/11. However, in later correspondence, Venn indicated that he and Leslie Stephen were temperamentally unsuited to each other as young men, rather than in doctrinaire disagreement: “I wish I could have seen more of him in early days, but in those days, we did not fit in well together. I suppose [he saw] in me the sanctimonious prig, & I in him the athletic rough. I don’t know which was furthest wrong.” John Venn to Laura Forster, 14 December 1902, SGL Venn.

94. See I. Ellis (1980), 2, 244; and Altholz (1994), 135.

95. Venn, “Annals,” 117.

96. See Venn, “Annals,” 117.

97. Venn, “Annals,” 104–5. See also Venn, “Annals,” 117.

98. Venn, “Annals,” 121.

99. Venn, “Annals,” 121.

100. Venn, “Annals,” 121, 119.

101. See Venn, “Annals,” 93, 120.

102. Clewlow (2007), 99.

103. Venn, “Annals,” 119. As Venn here added: “Such gifts were not so frequent then [and] most of the people interested in church affairs were too much in sympathy with the vicar to pay attention to his unsatisfactory curate. Moreover, I had made no attempt to make myself popular, and certainly not to ingratiate myself with any opposing party in the parish.”

Chapter 4

1. Venn, “Annals,” 38, 22.

2. Venn, “Annals,” 28.

3. Venn, “Annals,” 38, 41.

4. Venn, “Annals,” 36.

5. Venn, “Annals,” 55.

6. Venn, “Annals,” 75.

7. Francis (1923), 112; Venn, “Annals,” 65, 66.

8. As Venn himself wrote, in his devotion to Tennyson he “was not singular, in fact the only wonder is that it was so long before I came under his influence, for Tennyson ruled the young men of my generation to an extent which probably no other poet has ever attained” (Venn, “Annals,” 65–66).

9. Venn, “Annals,” 65.

10. Venn, “Annals,” 66.

11. Venn, “Annals,” 66.

12. Venn, “Annals,” 66, 67. For example, Monro could speak fluently Gaelic, Irish, Spanish, German, and Norse, and he had a fair knowledge of Italian and scholarly knowledge of Greek, Latin, Persian, and Arabic. As Francis wrote, “gifted as he was with a keenly sensitive ear [Monro’s] pronunciation of every language he could speak was so meticulously accurate as to deceive the very natives themselves” (Francis [1923], 112).

13. Venn, “Annals,” 67, Venn (1908), 163.

14. Venn (1908), 163–64.

15. Venn, “Annals,” 77–78.

16. Pollock (1858), 38.

17. Venn, “Annals,” 89. See also J. A. Venn (1937), 869.

18. Venn, “Annals,” 95.

19. Venn, “Annals,” 96–97.

20. Venn, “Annals,” 95, 96. Venn’s reference is probably to the English churchman William Hodge Mill, the first principal of Bishop’s College, Calcutta, who in 1848 became Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge.

21. Venn, “Annals,” 96, Mill (1989 [1859]), 62.

22. See Venn, “Annals,” 35, 121.

23. Venn, “Annals,” 121.

24. Venn, “Annals,” 98.

25. See Venn, “Annals,” 98.

26. Ryan (2016 [1970]), 85; Collini (1993), 129–30. See Snyder (2006), introduction.

27. See Collini (1993), 176–78. See also, for example, William Stanley Jevons to John Venn, 25 March 1876, GCA, Venn Papers, C34/2a; John Venn to Francis Galton, 8 May 1888, UCL FG, F26. While it is well known that Leslie and Fitzjames Stephen and Sidgwick disagreed, for example, with some of Mill’s views on political and social issues, the surviving evidence does not cast any conclusive light on Venn’s views of any other work than System of Logic and, to a much lesser extent, Political Economy.

28. Venn, “Annals,” 99.

29. Venn, “Annals,” 102.

30. Venn, “Annals,” 102–4.

31. Venn, “Annals,” 108.

32. Venn, “Annals,” 109, 110.

33. Venn, “Annals,” 113, 114.

34. Venn, “Annals,” 114.

35. Venn, “Annals,” 114.

36. John Venn to Laura Forster, 30 March 1917, SGL Venn.

37. See Francis (1923), 113. See also Venn, “Annals,” 112–13.

38. Venn, “Annals,” 112.

39. Venn, “Annals,” 113. As Venn continued: “the germs which I thus picked up developed into one of the later chapters of my [Principles of] Empirical Logic many years afterwards.” See chapter 11 for a discussion of Venn’s 1889 Principles.

40. Venn, “Annals,” 116.

41. Venn, “Annals,” 89.

42. Venn, “Annals,” 89.

43. Venn, “Annals,” 89; Buckle (1857), 6. For an account of the (context of the) reception of Buckle’s History, see, for example, Hesketh (2011), chapter 11; Porter (1986), chapter 3; Semmel (1976); and B. Young (2017). As Hesketh writes: “Buckle’s personal library numbered around 20,000 volumes by 1859, enabling the sickly man to avoid public libraries and diligently work toward completing his ambitious project on his own schedule. Buckle was able to afford such a massive library as well as the time necessary to engage in daily study because he came from a fairly wealthy merchant family” (Hesketh [2011], 16).

44. Venn, “Annals,” 112.

45. Buckle (1857), 18.

46. Venn, “Annals,” 89.

47. Buckle (1857), 26.

48. Mill (1862), 524.

49. Mill (1862), 527.

50. Mill (1862), 527, 526.

51. Mill (1862), 528.

52. Mill (1862), 527, 528.

53. Mill (1843b), 535.

54. Mill (1843b), 535.

55. Mill (1843b), 579.

56. Mill (1843b), 580.

57. For a comparison of the views of Buckle and Mill, see, for example, Hesketh (2011), chapter 2; and S. Turner (1986), chapter 3. See Aldrich (2008) for an account of Mill’s position vis-à-vis the role of statistics in science.

58. Venn, “Annals,” 116.

59. Venn, “Annals,” 116.

60. James Fitzjames Stephen to John Venn, 19 January 1862, GCA Venn Papers, C12/1. During the late 1850s and early 1860s, James Fitzjames Stephen published several articles on the science of history in which he distanced himself from Buckle (see Colaiaco [1983], chapter 3; Porter [1986], 166–67). In the 1862 edition of the System of Logic, Mill applauded James Fitzjames Stephen’s published views on the vital role that individual actions played in generating historical change (see Mill [1862], Book VI, chapter 11).

61. See Venn, “Annals,” 116. For an account of Froude’s editorship, see Brady (2013), chapter 8.

62. Venn (1862), 651.

63. Venn (1862), 652.

64. During the 1860s, the terms “science of history” and “science of sociology” were often used almost interchangeably. See Heyck (1982), 133–34, for a brief explanation.

65. Venn (1862), 652. Robert Fitzroy, best known to posterity for offering a berth to the young Charles Darwin on the Beagle voyage, stood at the head of the new government office for meteorological statistics, which began in 1854.

66. Venn (1862), 653.

67. Venn (1862), 653.

68. John Stuart Mill to John Venn, GCA Venn Papers, C52/2.

69. Venn (1862), 653.

70. See Venn (1862), 653.

71. Venn (1862), 654.

72. Venn (1862), 654.

73. Venn (1862), 654.

74. Venn (1862), 654.

75. Venn (1862), 658. Thus, Venn wrote: “The philosopher mingles with his humbler brethren, but mentally, he is often separated from them as though by a million miles of space. When he discusses the present position and the future prospects of the ‘City Arabs,’ the ‘dangerous classes’ . . . , what he says will probably never reach their ears, or, if it does, will never influence their conduct. Here we must allow something approaching to prediction” (Venn [1862], 657).

76. Thus, as Venn wrote: “There are, in the first place, [events] which for any reason are to be avoided; these we may call Nineveh predictions. The prediction will, strictly speaking, fail here; but it may accomplish all the good which was intended. . . . And, on the other hand, every improvement in society would be rapidly introduced and advanced; these we may call Macbeth prophecies, inasmuch as their fulfilment is in great part a consequence of their utterance” (Venn [1862], 659, 660).

77. Venn (1862), 660.

78. James Fitzjames Stephen to John Venn, 19 January 1862, GCA Venn Papers, C12/1.

79. Thus, as Fitzjames Stephen wrote: “The laws which govern the material world, and the causes of physical phenomena, are more or less discoverable by the human mind. . . . But the course of inquiry directed to human actions, or to that aggregate of human actions which is called history, is totally opposite to the course of physical science. The moral relations of mankind, the motions of the mind determining certain actions, and the combination of particular causes in the general result, are by their nature infinite, and the further they are traced the more intricate does their connexion become” (J. F. Stephen [1858], 478).

80. See Collini (2002 [1989]), 52.

Chapter 5

1. The changing view of the academic profession between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century has been labeled by Engel, for Oxford, the transition “from clergyman to don” (Engel [1983]); Rothblatt has described the process, for Cambridge, as “the revolution of the dons” (Rothblatt [1968]). The case of Venn makes clear that both are more or less stereotypes. Venn, in fact, provides a means to explore Collini’s notion of individual intellectual identity as being constituted of a complex mix of overlapping identities and membership—as lecturer, logician, clergyman, husband, and member of clubs and societies (Collini [1993], 27).

2. Unless otherwise indicated, references in what follows are to Venn (1901a), 247–49.

3. Clark (1904), 369–70. The Whewell Moral Philosophy Prize had been established in 1849 with an endowment from William Whewell. It was awarded annually between 1851 and 1855, when Whewell resigned his professorship. His successors did not continue the prize. See Venn, “Annals,” 118.

4. Venn, “Annals,” 118. Both Cambridge and Oxford had an arrangement whereby candidates for the Indian Civil Service were in residence for two years before taking up their professional duties. These students were outside the normal obligations of a college lecturer and normally did not take degrees (see Deane [2001], 225, 27; Whitaker [1996], 27n7). See GCA, GOV/03/01/11, Gesta, 3 April 1862, 11 December 1861.

5. Venn, “Annals,” 118. In the 1860s and 1870s, Venn spent holidays in Wales and the Lake District walking with friends, like Seeley, and with fellow college reformers and future masters of Caius, Ferrers and E. S. Roberts.

6. Venn, “Annals,” 117.

7. Venn, “Annals,” 123.

8. See Searby (1997), chapter 14; Winstanley (1947), chapters 5, 7, and 9. There has been much debate on the nature of the reform period. Whereas Rothblatt (1968) famously characterized the period as “revolutionary,” in Annan (1951) and Annan (1984) it was characterized as “reactionary.” See, for example, Garland (1980) for a discussion.

9. Venn, “Annals,” 76, 136. During the mid-Victorian years, interest in educational theory or, more specifically, a “liberal education” was in vogue among thinkers inside (Adam Sedgwick, George Peacock, Whewell, et al.) and outside (Mill, T. H. Huxley, et al.) Cambridge.

10. Venn, “Annals,” 77.

11. John Venn to Laura Forster, 27 January 1903, SGL Venn.

12. Venn quoted in Sidgwick and Sidgwick (1906), 134.

13. J. B. Pearson (1874 [2009]), 180.

14. Venn quoted in Sidgwick and Sidgwick (1906), 134.

15. Whewell (1850), 6. Whewell’s educational views are discussed in detail in P. Williams (1991).

16. Garland (1980), viii; Whewell (1850), 225.

17. It was not a coincidence that the two new triposes in the natural sciences and moral sciences were introduced just before the Royal (Graham) Commission (1850–52) began its deliberations. On the details of the development of the Moral Sciences Tripos, see Palfrey (2002); Sidgwick (1876); Winstanley (1940), 208–13; and Winstanley (1947), 185–90.

18. See Palfrey (2002), 120–25, 146. See Cannon (1964) on the educational views of the “rationalist node” of what has —somewhat misleadingly—been called the “Cambridge Network.”

19. Yeo (1993), 200. See also Schneewind (1977) in this regard.

20. See Cambridge University Papers, D.C. 5650, Cambridge University Library. The substitution of mental philosophy for law was justified because from 1854 a new tripos provided for regular legal studies.

21. Grote, “Remarks on the proposals of the Syndicate in reference to the Moral Science Tripos,” TCL, LL696, C.127/18. Mill challenged Whewell in his Dr. Whewell on Moral Philosophy (1852); Bain, for his part, had criticized Whewell’s views on Cambridge curriculum, found in the 1845 Of a Liberal Education, in a review of 1848 published in the Westminster and Foreign Quarterly. See Bain (1848).

22. Venn (1901a), 143. As Venn noted about Edwin Guest: “He was an old-fashioned conservative, who regarded Classics and Mathematics as the sole appropriate introduction to a general education” (Venn [1901a], 143). See Brooke (1985), chapter 12, for an account of Caius in the 1860s. Brooke remarks that the period between Venn’s own youth in the 1850s and the 1880s, “one of the most intriguing in the College’s history,” is “singularly ill-recorded” (Brooke [1985], 225). See chapter 12 for a brief discussion.

23. Brooke (1985), 218. See also Venn, “Annals,” 74.

24. The advocates of the new Moral Sciences Tripos self-consciously presented it as a good preparation for the business of life, whether that be at the bar, in the pulpit, or in the Indian Civil Service. See Collini, Winch, and Burrow (1983), 346. Venn himself spoke of “modern theories in accordance with which a student at college is allowed to specialize at will for his future profession, and almost for his future trade” (Venn [1901a], 144).

25. See Francis (1923), 118–19; and Venn, “Annals,” 125–26.

26. Venn, “Annals,” 124. Where Sidgwick was appointed to a lectureship in moral sciences at Trinity in 1867, Marshall was appointed as lecturer in moral sciences St. John’s one year later, in 1868.

27. See, for example, CUC (1862), 27. See Gibbins (2001), 73–79, for a discussion of the reading list.

28. Venn, “Annals,” 124.

29. John Venn to Henry Venn of CMS, 8 May 1863, CMS Venn, C40/18.

30. Venn, “Annals,” 126–27. Venn especially liked that the moral sciences initially did not experience the “tyranny of examinations” (Venn, “Annals,” 126; cf. Venn [1901a], 144; Venn, “Annals,” 77).

31. John Venn to Henry Venn of CMS, 17 October 1863, CMS Venn, C40/19.

32. Henry Venn to John Venn of Hereford, 10 February 1864, CMS Venn, C34/95.

33. Venn, “Annals,” 124.

34. See Brooke (1985), chapter 12. As Brooke writes, “Caius was the first College to sweep away all bars to matrimony on every member of its foundation. Other colleges went a certain distance in 1860–61; Oxford began slowly to follow in the late 60s and 70s; and by the end of 1882 when the statutes forbidding fellows to marry were finally wound up only small pockets of celibacy survived” (Brooke [1985], 224). The process of college lecturers taking over from coaches did not finally conclude in many subjects until the 1940s or 1950s, “partly because college or intercollegiate instruction was not provided for every paper in the honours and poll examinations and partly because some students were either too ill-prepared or too unintelligent to get through the examinations without additional assistance” (Rothblatt [1968], 234).

35. Venn, “Annals,” 124.

36. See, for example, Venn (1901a), 249; Venn (1913), 256. In this context, see also Tullberg (1998 [1975]), chapter 5; and Underwood (2001).

37. Venn (1901a), 153.

38. Venn’s Logic of Chance was added to the list in the course of the 1870s and remained there until the 1910s. See, for example, Sidgwick (1876), 246; Ward (1891), 5; and CUR (1911), xxxviii. See also Venn (1866), xiv.

39. Venn, “Annals,” 146.

40. Venn, “Annals,” 146.

41. See H. Lee Warren to J. B. Mayor, 12 October 1866, TCL, Mayor Papers, Acc.Ms.b.16/152.

42. Henry Sidgwick to mother, 21 October 1866, TCL, Henry Sidgwick Papers, Add.Ms.c.99/73.

43. Circular from John Venn, 13 October 1866, TCL, Henry Sidgwick Papers, Add.Ms.c.111/60.

44. Henry Sidgwick to mother, 21 October 1866, TCL, Henry Sidgwick Papers, Add.Ms.c.99/73.

45. Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 27 October 1866, CMS Venn, C34/115.

46. Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 27 October 1866, CMS Venn, C34/115.

47. Venn, “Annals,” 146. Venn’s estimation of Maurice’s work as Knightbridge Professor was similar to that of Sidgwick, who wrote that Maurice influenced his students through “the impressiveness and personal charm of his personal presence and conversation” rather than through lectures or writings (Sidgwick [1876], 242).

48. Henry Sidgwick to his mother, 21 October 1866, TCL, Henry Sidgwick Papers, Add.Ms.c.99/73. On Maurice’s role within the Cambridge Apostles and his return to Cambridge as Knightbridge Professor, see, for example, Allen (1978), chapter 4.

49. Venn retained his external examinership at the University of London until 1876. See Venn (1898), 313. For the 1871 vacancies, Venn asked Mill and Alexander Bain for a recommendation, which they provided, respectively, on 18 March 1871 and 16 April 1872. See Alexander Bain to John Venn, 18 March 1871, GCA Venn Papers, C15/1; and John Stuart Mill to John Venn, 16 April 1872, GCA Venn Papers, C52/4a. Another vacancy in the examinership in logic seemed to have been available as early as in 1868. About this vacancy, Mill wrote that “any influence it is in my power to exercise is pre-engaged in favour of another highly qualified candidate” (John Stuart Mill to John Venn, 18 March 1868, GCA Venn Papers, C52/2).

50. Henry Sidgwick to F. Myers, [n.d.] April 1872, TCL, Add.Ms.c.100/225.

51. Henry Sidgwick to F. Myers, [n.d.] April 1872, TCL, Add.Ms.c.100/225. As Sidgwick explained in this same letter: “The whole matter is of considerable importance to my prospects. I shall most likely leave Cambridge if either Venn or Pearson is elected: as I want to concentrate myself on Practical Philosophy, and the new Professor being active will occupy this sphere.” Some fifteen years later, Venn picked up the notion of “Practic” in his Principles of 1889. See chapter 11 for a discussion.

52. Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 16 April 1872, CMS Venn, C34/192. See also Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 4 August 1872, CMS Venn, C34/197. Venn also sent the pamphlet to Mill, who responded by writing that the pamphlet “shows that you have applied the same clear and vigorous intellect to the subject of ethics which was conspicuous in your logical pamphlets” (John Stuart Mill to John Venn, 16 April 1872, GCA, Venn Papers, C52/4a). At the same time, in the same letter Mill also criticized Venn: “Whether your opinions and my own on that subject [of ethics] altogether agree is . . . a secondary consideration. I should not fear to defend Kant’s maxim against your criticisms. He could not mean, nor could Paley mean, that we should so act that the whole human race should for general benefit do exactly what we are doing; they meant that our conduct ought to be capable of being brought under a rule to which it would be for the general benefit that all should conform.” As said, the notion of “Practic” would reappear many years later in Venn’s Principles, as discussed in chapter 11.

53. John Stuart Mill to John Venn, 16 April 1872, GCA, Venn Papers, C52/4a.

54. Henry Sidgwick to Anne Jemima Clough, 25 May 1872, quoted in Sidgwick and Sidgwick (1906), 265.

55. Anonymous (1874), 451.

56. Henry Sidgwick to F. Myers, [n.d.] May 1872, quoted in Sidgwick and Sidgwick (1906), 264.

57. Henry Sidgwick to F. Myers, 1 May 1872, quoted in Sidgwick and Sidgwick (1906), 264.

58. “Autobiographical notes 1844–67, from birth to marriage (1885), by S.C.V.,” CMS Venn, F30, 3.

59. “Autobiographical notes 1844–67, from birth to marriage (1885), by S.C.V.,” CMS Venn, F30, 12–13.

60. Saintsbury (1876), 237.

61. “Autobiographical notes 1844–67, from birth to marriage (1885), by S.C.V.,” CMS Venn, F30, 20.

62. “Autobiographical notes 1844–67, from birth to marriage (1885), by S.C.V.,” CMS Venn, F30, 21.

63. “Autobiographical notes 1844–67, from birth to marriage (1885), by S.C.V.,” CMS Venn, F30, 22.

64. For a couple of years, Henry Venn and his son corresponded frequently about the financial arrangements, consulting two lawyers and considering their proposals. See, for example, Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 6 February 1867, 6 April 1867, 7 May 1869, CMS Venn, C34/117, C34/199, C34/146.

65. Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 20 March 1867, CMS Venn, C34/118.

66. See Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 10 September 1867, CMS Venn, C34/129.

67. See Bryan and Wise (2004), 211–12.

68. Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 6 April 1867, CMS Venn, C34/199.

69. As Susanna Venn wrote in her autobiographical notes: “I tried religious reading but all books in the least unorthodox were forbidden, & orthodoxy had not come before me in a light that I could either rest or work on” (“Autobiographical notes 1844–67, from birth to marriage (1885), by S.C.V.,” CMS Venn, F30, 21. A small part of the little available correspondence between John and Susanna Venn—which starts as late as in 1895—is rendered inaccessible through being written in a version of the family shorthand, though a lot of such shorthand codes have been deciphered.

70. See the obituary of Susanna Venn in the Times, 27 March 1931 (Anonymous [1931]) and also in the Cambridge Independent Press of 12 June 1884.

71. Raffaelli, Biagini, and Tullberg (1995), 53; Tullberg (1998 [1975]), 1.

72. On the different strategies concerning women’s education, see, for example, Robinson (2002), chapter 2.

73. For the Sidgwick-Clough connection, see Gallant (2009), chapter 1.

74. See Tullberg (1998 [1975]), 42.

75. See Sidgwick and Sidgwick (1906), 205–7.

76. See Tullberg (1998 [1975]), 42.

77. See CUR, 1 February 1871, 165.

78. See CUR, 1 March 1871, 220.

79. Mary Paley Marshall, the great-granddaughter of William Paley who married her former economics tutor Marshall in 1876, sketched her memories of the frugal communal life with Miss Clough in What I Remember of 1947.

80. Henry Sidgwick to Alfred Marshall, July or August 1871, quoted in Whitaker (1996), 78–79.

81. See Clewlow (2007), 120n82.

82. Paley Marshall (1947), 16, 17.

83. Mary Paley Marshall quoted in J. M. Keynes (2010 [1944]), 237. The implicit reference here is to Tennyson’s “The Princess.”

84. Paley Marshall (1947), 18.

85. See Paley Marshall (1947), 16, 18.

86. Tullberg (1998 [1975]), 1. See also Deslandes (2005), chapter 6; Leedham-Green (1996), 176–78; and Tullberg (1998 [1975]), chapter 6.

87. Lubenow (2015), 33.

88. Venn, “Annals,” 127; John Venn to Joseph Bickersteth Mayor, 4 November 1866, TCL, Mayor Papers, Add.Ms.b.16/135. The group was named the Grote Club in honor of Grote, after his death. Venn and the others did not know it by that name. See Venn quoted in Sidgwick and Sidgwick (1906), 135.

89. Venn in Sidgwick and Sidgwick (1906), 135.

90. J. R. Mozley to F. B. Mayor, 21 April 1904, TCL, Mayor Papers, Add.Ms.c.104/66.

91. Venn in Sidgwick and Sidgwick (1906), 135. There exists a considerable body of literature on the Grote Club. See Gibbins (2007), 473, for a full list of references.

92. See Groenewegen (1998), 112–13, who quotes from the records that Marshall kept of the Grote Society meetings.

93. Marshall, for example, presented four papers to the Grote Club, which have been published in Raffaelli (1994).

94. Venn, “Annals,” 128–29.

95. Venn quoted in Sidgwick and Sidgwick (1906), 135.

96. Venn (1866), 171n. The life and work of John Grote is analyzed in detail in Gibbins (1987); Gibbins (2007); and MacDonald (1966).

97. Grote (1865), xxxv.

98. Gibbins (1987), 354. For Grote’s influence on Sidgwick—“Stephen’s hypothesis”—see Schneewind (1974); Schneewind (1977), 47–48; and L. Stephen (1901), 5. Another case in point is Marshall, who allegedly developed his own version of (neoclassical) economics drawing on Grote’s works and the dialogues he heard between Grote and Sidgwick. See, for example, Cook (2009), chapter 3; and Groenewegen (1998), 109–11.

99. While preparing Sidgwick’s obituary for Mind, it was to Venn that Leslie Stephen turned for confirmation that Sidgwick owed a larger debt to Grote and the Grote Club than Sidgwick admitted in his lifetime. See Leslie Stephen to John Venn, 30 October 1900, GCL, Venn Papers, C12/3. See also Venn quoted in Sidgwick and Sidgwick (1906), 136.

100. Passmore (1957), 52–53n.

101. John Venn to Joseph Bickersteth Mayor, 4 November 1866, TCL, Mayor Papers, Acc.Ms.b.16/135.

102. John Venn to Joseph Bickersteth Mayor, 4 November 1866, TCL, Mayor Papers, B16/135.

103. John Venn to Joseph Bickersteth Mayor, 4 November 1866, TCL, Mayor Papers, B16/135.

104. See, in this context, Lubenow (2015), 44–48; Sidgwick and Sidgwick (1906), 223; and Treloar (1998), 157. The Eranus Society was founded in 1872. (“Eranus” originally meant a pot-luck [i.e., collaborative] meal.) Somewhat remarkably, membership of the Eranus Society was neither recorded in the biographies of Fawcett, Clifford, or Venn nor mentioned in any of the letters of Sidgwick or Venn. Venn nowhere made mention of his attendance or papers prepared for the society. Venn’s alleged membership of the Savile Club, founded in 1868 by, among others, Morley, Leslie Stephen, T. H. Green, and W. E. Forster, is supported by even less evidence (see Anderson [1993], 15).

105. See Sidgwick quoted in Sidgwick and Sidgwick (1906), 223–24.

106. See Sidgwick and Sidgwick (1906), 223–24; Stuart (1911), 195–96.

107. The full title of Maxwell’s essay prepared for the Eranus Society was “Does the Progress of Physical Science Tend to Give Any Advantage to the Opinion of Necessity (or Determinism) over That of the Contingency of Events and the Freedom of the Will?” See Marston (2014), 273.

108. Venn quoted in Sidgwick and Sidgwick (1906), 135.

109. For the wider context of the “mid-Victorian generation,” see Hoppen (1998).

Chapter 6

1. The literature on aspects of the introduction of Continental mathematics into Victorian Britain by the Analytical Society is vast and ever growing. Richards (1997) provides a helpful starting point.

2. Venn (1866), 67.

3. Venn, “Annals,” 130. Venn used the word “check” in the sense of “stopping” or “counteracting.” See Venn (1889a), 585–86.

4. See Daston (1988) for a detailed account of the tradition of classical probability in the Enlightenment.

5. See Venn, “Annals,” 97. See chapter 9 for a discussion of Venn’s treatment of Boole’s work.

6. Venn, “Annals,” 130.

7. Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 2 May 1866, CMS Venn, C34/110. See also Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 15 April 1866, CMS Venn, C34/109.

8. Venn (1866), 369–70.

9. Venn (1866), xiii.

10. See Laplace (1995 [1852]), 3–4.

11. Mill (1843b), 71–72.

12. J. M. Keynes (1921), 94.

13. Peirce (1867), 317; John Maynard Keynes to John Venn, 31 August 1921, GCA, Venn Papers, C49. As the reviewer of the Saturday Reviewer remarked, the book “might be easily read after dinner” (Anonymous [1866], 490).

14. Venn (1876a), xiii. See Venn (1866); Venn (1876a); Venn (1888a); Venn (1962) (a reprint of the third edition). Hald (1998), Stigler (1986), and Stigler (1999) are the authoritative sources on the history of mathematical statistics, in which are also provided the technical details of the nineteenth-century mathematical statistics to which Venn at some points referred.

15. This structure is maintained in the following discussion of The Logic of Chance. All references will in principle be to the first edition, except in those cases where a passage occurs in only the second and/or third edition, when references will be given to both editions, or when there exists a striking difference between the same passage in each of the respective editions. This chapter focuses primarily on parts 1 and 2.

16. Hacking (1990), 3; Kilinç (1999), 560.

17. Venn (1866), 13. As the amount of collected data became greater in the 1860s and 1870s, more and more causes and variations were revealed; and as the diversity and heterogeneity of the individuals in society became impossible to overlook, the statistical regularities suggestive of “statistical determinism” became increasingly untenable. See Porter (1986), 151–52; and Stigler (1999), 66–67.

18. Venn (1866), 14. The explicit reference to Darwin’s “Doctrine of Evolution”—in the context of a discussion of Quetelet’s notion of a “type”—appeared only in the second and third editions of The Logic of Chance (see Venn [1876a], 42–43, 58–59; Venn [1888a], 48, 64–65). These passages were written in terms with which the Darwins, father and son, could identify, for in 1873 Charles Darwin had written to Nature on the same subject (of the statistical distribution of characters before and during speciation), and George Darwin had further worked out his father’s position and extended the argument to the postspeciation distribution (see C. Darwin [1873]; G. Darwin [1873]).

19. Venn (1866), 56.

20. Venn (1866), 56–57, 23.

21. Venn (1866), 56, 57.

22. Venn (1866), 57, 58.

23. Venn (1866), 281.

24. Venn’s entry point might be said to have been slightly misleading insofar as early nineteenth-century developments in probability theory, such as what is sometimes called the “calculus of induction,” drew their examples from astronomical observations and related error curves.

25. Venn (1866), 27. See also Venn (1866), 164.

26. Venn (1866), 30–31.

27. Venn (1866), 298.

28. Laplace cited (and translated) in Venn (1866), 33.

29. Venn (1866), 34. Cf. Venn (1876a), 83–84; Venn (1888a), 89.

30. Venn (1866), 34. Cf. Venn (1876a), 84; Venn (1888a), 90.

31. Venn (1866), 34–35. Cf. Venn (1876a), 84; Venn (1888a), 90.

32. Venn (1866), 36. Cf. Venn (1876a), 85; Venn (1888a), 92, where Venn used a slightly more cautious expression. As such, Venn’s dismissal of Bernoulli’s use of “objective probability” problematizes the standard story about the emergence, in the nineteenth century, of the distinction between “objective” and “subjective” probability. Cf. Daston (1994); Verburgt (2015); Zabell (2011).

33. Venn (1866), 58.

34. Venn (1866), 43.

35. Given their mathematical nature, the discussion of these questions was rather technical. At the same time, however, both the second and the third edition of The Logic of Chance still maintained that probability theory was “a material science which employs mathematics” and not “a formal one which consists of nothing but mathematics” (Venn [1876a], 82; Venn [1888], 88).

36. This topic is discussed in chapter 10.

37. On the history of probability logic, see, for example, Hailperin (1988).

38. De Morgan (1847), v.

39. Venn (1866), 82.

40. Venn (1866), 82.

41. Venn (1866), 83.

42. Venn (1866), 85.

43. Venn (1866), 85.

44. Peirce (2014 [1877]), 117.

45. Venn (1866), 112.

46. Venn (1866), 121.

47. Venn (1866), 122.

48. Venn (1866), 57, 167.

49. Despite its flaws, Venn’s criticism was rather influential. The famous statistician Ronald Fisher would at various occasions mention Venn as one of the authorities responsible for the decline in the prestige of inverse methods.

50. Venn (1866), 153. The statement is not entirely correct, for the theorem holds only on the condition that the prior probabilities of the possible frequencies are equal. Venn’s attack on Laplace’s rule of succession has been described as “so viciously unfair that even [Harold] Fischer was impelled to come to Laplace’s defense.” Jaynes (1989 [1976]), 201. For the history of the rule, see, for example, Dale (1991); and Zabell (1989).

51. Strong (1976) and Zabell (2005), 55–56, have analyzed the importance of the “dice,” “lottery” or “ballot box” metaphors for the tradition of inverse probability. For anticipations of Venn’s criticism, see Boole (1854), 369; R. L. Ellis (1844), 3.

52. Venn (1888a), 197. See Venn (1866), 164, for the same point.

53. Venn (1866), 164.

54. Venn (1866), 175.

55. For a detailed discussion of the reference class problem in Venn’s Logic of Chance, see Kilinç (1999); and Kilinç (2001). The problem is widely regarded to be specific to the frequency theory of probability and often considered to be fatal to it (see Hajek [2007]).

56. Venn (1866), 181.

57. Venn (1866), 38.

58. Venn (1866), 24. For similar passages, see Venn (1876a), 87; Venn (1888a), 93,

59. Venn (1876a), 215; Venn (1888a), 234.

60. See, for example, Johnson (1888) for a “scholarly” review (Johnson was a former pupil of Venn writing in Mind); and Anonymous (1866) and Anonymous (1867) for periodical reviews of The Logic of Chance. For an early and later mention of The Logic of Chance in the context of the examination of the Moral Sciences Tripos, see, for example, Student’s Guide to the University of Cambridge (1880), 11, 12; and CUC (1911), xxxviii.

61. Venn, “Annals,” 145.

62. John Stuart Mill to John Venn, 4 February 1868, GCA, Venn Papers, C52/1a. Over the years, Venn also received positive comments on his book from the likes of the Scottish logician and Mill’s biographer Alexander Bain and the German philosopher Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg. See Alexander Bain to John Venn, 18 March 1871, GCA, Venn Papers, C15/1; Adolf Trendelenburg to John Venn, [n.d.] 1870, GCA, Venn Papers, C75.

63. See, for example, Peirce (1867); Peirce (1882 [1866]); and Peirce (1986 [1878]).

64. Von Mises was unfamiliar with The Logic of Chance until the year 1919, when the mathematician George Pólya first drew his attention to its existence (see Siegmund-Schultze [2006], 501, 504). Salmon (1980) noted that Reichenbach did not have any firsthand knowledge of Venn’s work.

65. An exception was the mathematician George Chrystal, who had a high regard for Venn’s work on probability. See, for instance, Chrystal (1892). Without mentioning any names, Keynes noted that “in spite of his having attracted a number of followers, there has been no other comprehensive attempt to meet the theory’s special difficulties or the criticisms directed against it” (J. M. Keynes [1921], 93).

66. F. Bradley (1883), 213–14.

67. F. Bradley (1883), 213, 14.

68. See Venn (1888a), xviii. The Venn-Edgeworth connection will be briefly touched on in chapter 12.

69. See, for example, Edgeworth (1884).

70. See Edgeworth (1888). See also, for example, Edgeworth (1921).

71. John Stuart Mill to John Venn, 4 February 1868, GCA, Venn Papers, C52/1a.

72. J. M. Keynes (1921), 98.

73. See Johnson (1888), 279.

74. John Maynard Keynes to John Venn, 31 August 1921, GCA, Venn Papers, C49.

75. Venn (1876a), xv.

Chapter 7

1. Venn, “Annals,” 139. See also Venn, “Annals,” 72–73. Venn was clearly a case in point when it comes to the strong relationship between Evangelicalism and the family (e.g., Rosman [1984]). Even among the Clapham families, the Venn family stood out as explicitly creating a particular familial ideal around its religious identity (cf. Stockton [1980]; Tolley [1997]).

2. Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 31 July 1863, CMS Venn, C34/91.

3. See John Venn to Henry Venn of CMS, 1 February 1863, 11 February 1863, 8 May 1863, [n.d.] February 1864, CMS Venn, C40/15, C40/16, C40/18, and C40/20.

4. Venn, “Annals,” 138.

5. Venn, “Annals,” 139. John Lamb, the vicar of St. Edward’s between 1858 and 1866, was a very active Caian, with an academic and clerical life showing some similarities to Venn’s. As Venn summarized his career in Biographical History of Gonville and Caius College: “Junior fellow, L. Day 1849: senior, Mich 1857 to L. Day 1877. Dean, 1852–60: catechist, 1856–7. For many years bursar. Sadlerian lecturer in the college. Ordained deacon (Ely) 1850: priest 1851. Hulsean lecturer, 1860. . . . He took much interest in the college history” (Venn [1898], 265). See also Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn (of Hereford), 10 February 1864, CMS Venn, C34/95.

6. Shenk (2006 [1983]), 21. The Evangelical machinery consisted of voluntary associations—such as CMS and the Religious Tract Society—a press and publication network—with journals such as the Christian Observer—and famous “May Meetings” in Exeter Hall.

7. See John Venn to Henry Venn of CMS, 18 November 1862, 24 April 1863, 7 March 1865, CMS Venn, C40/12, C40/17, C40/21.

8. John Venn to Henry Venn of CMS, 8 May 1863, 7 March 1865, CMS Venn, C40/18, C40/21.

9. Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 22 October 1862, CMS Venn, C34/87.

10. As Clewlow remarks, it is not exactly clear how strong the Clapham connection remained at a distance of one or two generations removed (Clewlow [2007], 127). At least two facts attest to the continuation of this connection. Firstly, in the early 1870s, Venn and his wife offered a home in Cambridge to one of the Elliotts experiencing financial difficulty (see Henry Venn of CMS to Susanna C. Venn, 2 March 1871, CMS Venn, C34). Secondly, in the early 1900s, Venn wrote that one reason of writing Annals of a Clerical Family was for his own son “to know who are his cousins in the world” (John Venn to Laura Forster, 9 December 1902, SGL Venn).

11. Henry Venn of CMS to Suzanna C. Venn, 8 February 1868, CMS Venn, C34/162.

12. Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 17 January 1870, CMS Venn, C34/163.

13. Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 29 December 1870, CMS Venn, C34/172. Some eight years earlier, Henry Venn asked his son for information about Leslie Stephen, writing that “his mother fears that he is one with [F. D.] Maurice” (Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 5 November 1862, CMS Venn, C34/88).

14. Clewlow (2007), 143.

15. See Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 5 November 1862, 7 November 1862, 10 February 1864, 11 March 1865, CMS Venn, C34/88, C40/11, C34/95, C34/104.

16. Evangelicalism has since long been regarded as an anti-intellectual movement. Not only Victorian critics, but also contemporary historians have seen it as one of the weaknesses of mid-Victorian Evangelicalism that “in its insistence on vital religion and personal holiness and service rather than a religion of books, there was a failure to underpin [the] theological basis for the Evangelical position through scholarship” (Clewlow [2007], 129–30; see also Bebbington [2005], 120; Bowen [1968], 146–51). Henry Venn of CMS, for his part, not only believed that each Christian was called according to his or her gifts but also saw the need for a “scholarly Evangelicalism” in the heated party conflict within the church. At the same time, for Henry Venn academic study always remained subservient to Christian life—as he made clear, for instance, in an 1828 sermon preached in the chapel of Queens’ College, Cambridge, entitled “Academical Studies Subservenient to the Edification of the Church.”

17. As becomes clear from some of the documents contained in the Venn Collection found in the Society of Genealogists Library Special Collections, the Venn family owned considerable stocks and shares in various railway, dock, and insurance companies. See CMS Venn, F46–F47 for details.

18. See Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 29 April 1868, CMS Venn, C34/135; and Henry Venn to John Venn (of Hereford), 14 October 1867 and November 1867 quoted in Knight (2009 [1882]), 344.

19. See Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, [n.d.] 1866, CMS Venn, C34/116. Thomas Birks was the son-in-law of Edward Bickersteth, a former secretary of the CMS, who held Simeon’s old parish, Holy Trinity.

20. Despite his declining health and his being over seventy, Henry Venn of CMS took over the editorship of the Christian Observer from J. B. Marsden, as no other candidate could be found. Under Henry Venn’s editorship the Christian Observer remained an organ of the Evangelical principles but was far from a mere party journal. “One is struck,” as the chronicler of the Church Missionary Society wrote, “by the courageous independence of the editorial utterances, especially as shown in the frequently severe reviews of books by well-known Evangelical writers” (Stock [1899], 656). On several occasions, Henry Venn asked his son about the academic opinion on recent works. For example, in October 1872, Venn received a letter from his father asking “information of what has been written by other portions in opposition to the views of [Charles] Lyell” (Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 11 October 1872, CMS Venn, C34/213).

21. See Henry Venn to John Venn, 11 March 1865, CMS Venn, C34/104. See Stanley (1865). Stanley’s article was first read at St. James’s Rectory, London, and afterward published in Fraser’s Magazine.

22. See Venn (1865).

23. See Venn (1871).

24. Venn (1871), 686.

25. Venn (1871), 687.

26. See Venn (1866), chap. 5.

27. Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, [n.d.], CMS Venn, C34/178; Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 19 August 1871, CMS Venn, C34/180.

28. Venn (1870a), 727.

29. Venn (1870a), 728.

30. Newman (1870), 281.

31. Venn (1870a), 732.

32. Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 12 August 1870, CMS Venn, C34/166.

33. Venn (1870a), 735.

34. Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 6 November 1871, CMS Venn, C34/186. In 1866, Henry Venn himself published a biography of St. Francis Xavier, a Roman Catholic missionary, which for someone in his position was itself extraordinary, especially since he displayed a considerable amount of admiration for some aspects of Xavier’s character. See, for instance, M. A. Smith (2008).

35. See Clewlow (2007), 135.

36. For accounts of the intellectual revolt against certain Christian doctrines and the demands of “honest doubt” in the ethics of belief, see, for instance, Altholz (1988); Bartholomew (1988); and Parsons (1988b).

37. Venn (1866), 329.

38. Venn (1878a), 502–3.

39. See McGrew and McGrew (2012), section 5, for a helpful discussion.

40. In the nineteenth-century edition of Hume’s Enquiry (which appeared in John Lubbock’s “One Hundred Books” series) the section “Of Miracles” was excised and printed as an appendix with a remarkable note saying that it was normally left out of popular editions.

41. Venn (1866), 233–34.

42. Venn (1888a), 403.

43. Venn (1866), 311–12.

44. Venn (1866), 310.

45. Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 18 February 1869, CMS Venn, C34/141. The Hulsean Lectures were established by the will of John Hulse, a clergyman and Cambridge graduate who bequeathed a considerable part of his inherited property to Cambridge University for several purposes, one of which was to endow an annual series of lectures or sermons on “The Evidences of Revealed Religion against notorious Infidels, whether Atheists or Deists, not descending to any particular sects or controversies amongst Christians themselves, except some new and strange error, either of superstition or enthusiasm as Popery or Methodism” (Hunt [1896], 332). Although the will was dated 1789, the revenues were not sufficient to begin the series of lectures until 1820.

46. Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 9 September 1869, CMS Venn, C34/153.

47. Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 9 September 1869, CMS Venn, C34/153.

48. Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 9 September 1869, CMS Venn, C34/153.

49. Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 17 January 1870, CMS Venn, C34/164.

50. Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 9 September 1869, CMS Venn, C34/153.

51. Venn (1870b), 81.

52. Venn (1870b), ix.

53. Venn (1870b), viii, ix.

54. Bain’s definition of belief as “that upon which a man is prepared to act,” put forward in the late 1860s, was embraced by C. S. Peirce in the early 1870s, when he wrote that pragmatism is not more than a corollary from this definition. See M. H. Fisch (1954).

55. Venn (1866), 98.

56. Venn (1866), 156.

57. Venn (1870b), xiv–xv.

58. Venn (1870b), viii.

59. Venn (1870b), 19–20.

60. Venn (1870b), 19, 17, 24n1. Venn might have derived the notion of a “theory of life” either from Mill or from Coleridge. In the third edition of the System of Logic of 1851, Mill laid the groundwork for introducing the “art of life” by distinguishing between science and art. According to Mill, whereas science consisted of descriptive claims asserting matters of fact, the normative claims belonging to art, in contrast, did not assert anything but recommended that something was done. Mill referred the reader to Utilitarianism (1861) for a further discussion; here, Mill had explained the principle of utility—that “pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends”—in terms of a “theory of life.” Mill (1863 [1861]), 10, 18. Coleridge, for his part, had used the phrase for the theory he developed in Hints towards the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life of 1848 as well as in a crucial passage in Aids to Reflection, where he wrote that “Christianity is not a theory, or a speculation; but a life.” Coleridge (1839 [1825]), 150.

61. Venn (1870b), 24n1, 72.

62. See Venn (1870b), 24n1. Comte’s “Religion of Humanity” focused the minds of many prominent Victorians on the possibility of replacing Christianity with an alternative religion based on scientific principles and humanist values. Widely discussed by scientists, philosophers, and theologians, it also attracted the attention, for instance, of Venn’s cousin Leslie Stephen. See, in this regard, Wright (2008).

63. Venn (1870b), 35–36, 78–79.

64. Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 15 September 1869, CMS Venn, C34/156.

65. Venn (1870b), 89.

66. Venn (1870b), 116.

67. Venn (1870b), 63.

68. Venn (1870b), 88.

69. For an account of (criticism of) Pascal’s wager, see Jordan (2006). For James’s criticism of Pascal’s wager and his alternative wager, see Slater (2009), chapter 2.

70. Venn (1870b), 115.

71. James (2014 [1896]), 6.

72. Venn (1870b), 115.

73. Venn (1870b), 116.

74. Venn (1870b), 117.

75. Venn (1870b), 120.

76. Venn (1870b), 119.

77. Venn (1870b), 121.

78. Venn, “Annals,” 139; Venn (1870b), 81.

79. John Venn to Henry Venn of CMS, 5 November 1862, CMS Venn, C40/11.

80. As Sidgwick wrote in April 1879: “Birks, the Professor of Moral Philosophy, has been lying for nearly a year hopelessly paralysed and almost unconscious. He cannot recover, but may live years or months” (Henry Sidgwick to F. W. Cornish, 18 May 1879, quoted in Sidgwick and Sidgwick [1906], 353).

81. John Venn to Nora Sidgwick, 20 March 1906, TCL, Henry Sidgwick Papers, Add.Ms.c.103/130. Venn wrote the letter after reading the following passage in Sidgwick’s Memoir: “As [Birks] could not appoint a deputy, it fell to the Vice-Chancellor to fill the chair temporarily: who passed over me and appointed my old pupil Cunningham. It was a very marked slight to my work” (Henry Sidgwick to F. W. Cornish, 18 May 1879, quoted in Sidgwick and Sidgwick [1906], 353). As Venn noted in the abovementioned letter, Sidgwick wrote “under a slight misapprehension” as “it was not quite so abrupt as this.”

82. See Cunningham (1950), 36; and Sidgwick and Sidgwick (1906), 353.

83. Sidgwick quoted in Sidgwick and Sidgwick (1906), 353.

84. Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 7 September 1869, CMS Venn, C34/152; Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 17 January 1870, CMS Venn, C34/163.

85. Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 17 January 1870, CMS Venn, C34/163.

86. John Venn to Henry Venn of CMS, [n.d.] February 1864, CMS Venn, C40/20.

87. John Venn to Henry Venn of CMS, [n.d.] February 1864, CMS Venn, C40/20.

88. Stanley quoted in Oliver (1885), 170. Stanley recorded his argumentation in “A letter to the Lord Bishop of London on the state of subscription in the Church of England and in the University of Oxford” of 1863.

89. Henry Venn of CMS to John Venn, 24 February 1864, CMS Venn, C34/97.

90. See E. C. S. Gibson (2005 [1896]), 64–65.

91. See Sidgwick (1870); L. Stephen (1988 [1870]). See also Clewlow (2007), 140–41, 156–57.

92. Henry Sidgwick to Anne Clough (?), July 1869, quoted in Schultz (2004), 124.

93. Venn, “Annals,” 93.

94. John Venn to Albert Venn Dicey, 2 March 1919, GUL Dicey, MS.Gen.508/26.

95. John Venn to Albert Venn Dicey, 2 March 1919, GUL Dicey, MS.Gen.508/26; Venn, “Annals,” 139.

96. Venn, “Annals,” 105; John Venn to Laura Forster, 4 December 1902, SGL Venn. Venn’s experience was not uncommon in the Victorian era. See, for example, I. Bradley (1976); and F. M. Turner (1990).

97. Venn’s later religious development is discussed in chapters 10 and 12.

98. John Venn to Albert Venn Dicey, 2 April 1919, GUL Dicey, MS.Gen.508/26. Newman’s conversion to Catholicism is described and contextualized in Von Arx (1990).

Chapter 8

1. Hamilton (1853 [1833], 120. Whately’s Elements of Logic—published first in 1823 as two volumes, then as a stand-alone volume in 1826—was among the books that marked the general course, which examination was to be taken in the “Logic” part of the Moral Sciences Tripos at Cambridge between the 1860s and 1890s. See, for example, CUC (1866), 30; and CUC (1899), xxxix.

2. On Whately’s revival of logic, see Jongsma (1982); and Van Evra (1984).

3. Whately (1827 [1826]), 88.

4. See Hamilton (1853 [1833]).

5. Whately (1827 [1826]), 209.

6. Hamilton (1853 [1833]), 160.

7. Hamilton (1866), 251.

8. Neither Hamilton nor De Morgan strictly had priority. For example, the application of diagrammatic methods in syllogistic reasoning proposed by the eighteenth-century figures Leonard Euler, Gottfried Ploucquet, and Johann Heinrich Lambert presupposed a quantification of the predicate.

9. See Baynes (1873); Jevons (1873); and Spencer (1873). William Thomson incorporated his own version of the quantification of the predicate into his 1842 Outline of the Necessary Laws of Thought. Mansel, for his part, defended Hamilton’s view of logic, for instance, in the notes to his edition of Aldrich’s Artis Logicae Rudimenta.

10. Bentham (1827), 127–28.

11. Mill (1828), 10. For an account of Mill’s review of Whately’s Elements of Logic, see, for example, Godden (2014), 51–52; and Scarre (1989), chapter 1.

12. Mill (1828), 14–15.

13. Mill (1873), 180; Mill (1828), 34.

14. Scarre (1989), 23. On the development of Mill’s views on logic, see, for example, Ducheyne and McCaskey (2014); and F. Wilson (2008).

15. See, in this context, the essays in Haaparanta (2009).

16. See Alborn (1996); Snyder (2006); Yeo (1985); and Yeo (1993).

17. See, for example, Grattan-Guinness (2004) and Peckhaus (2009) for accounts of the introduction of mathematics, more specifically of “symbolic algebra” or “calculus of operations,” into logic in Britain.

18. For a discussion, see, for example, Houser (1994). See G. C. Smith (1982) for the Boole–De Morgan correspondence; and Merrill (1990) for a comprehensive account of De Morgan’s contributions to logic.

19. Hailperin (1986), 66.

20. See Corcoran (2003) for a comparison of Aristotle’s Prior Analytics and Boole’s Laws of Thought.

21. Boole (1854), 3.

22. Boole (1847), 15.

23. Boole (1854), 27.

24. Boole (1854), 22.

25. Boole (1854), 61.

26. Boole (1854), 8. On the problem of elimination in the algebra of logic, see Green (1991).

27. See Mill (1843a). The following account is largely based on Ducheyne and McCaskey (2014); and Godden (2014).

28. Whately (1827 [1826]), 11.

29. Mill (1843a), 245–46. See also Mill (1865), 463.

30. Mill (1843a), 262, 259.

31. Mill (1843a), 306–7.

32. Mill (1843a), 372.

33. On the Mill-Whewell debate, see Snyder (2006).

34. See Whewell (1860), 264.

35. Whewell (1847 [1840]), 48.

36. The following discussion of Venn’s logical papers is limited to those articles and reviews written between 1874 and 1880 that give the clearest impression of the development of his views in this period. Hence, one article and several reviews have been excluded from it: Venn (1878b); Venn (1881d); Venn (1884b); Venn (1884c); and Venn (1884d).

37. Jevons’s work on logic is discussed in Mays and Henry (1953); Mosselmans (2007), chapter 4; and Mosselmans and Van Moer (2008).

38. Croom Robertson (1876), 206.

39. Venn (1874), 381.

40. Venn (1874), 381. See William Stanley Jevons to John Venn, 8 October 1874, GCA, Venn Papers, C45/2.

41. Venn (1874), 382.

42. Venn (1874), 382.

43. See Laudan (1973).

44. Halsted (1878) provided an in-depth discussion of Jevons’s criticism of Boole’s system.

45. Venn (1874), 382.

46. Warwick (2003), 95. See in this context also Richards (1988).

47. Venn (1874), 383.

48. Venn (1874), 382.

49. Venn (1876b), 43. Mind was established by Alexander Bain, who chose George Croome Robertson as the first editor and personally subsidized Mind during the period of his editorship. See Sorley (1926).

50. Venn (1876b), 43.

51. Venn (1876b), 44.

52. J. N. Keynes (1894), 25; Venn (1876b), 45. See also Minto (1895), part 3, chapter 1. Thus, whereas Hamilton, for instance, took thought and language to be co-dependent, De Morgan, for instance, emphasized that it did not matter whether symbols were considered to represent things, thoughts, or words. See Van Evra (2008), 507–8.

53. See Jevons (1870b), 214. For a historical contextualization of the idea of “perfect induction,” which, according to many adherents, went back to Aristotle’s Prior Analytics; see Groarke (2009), chapter 3.

54. Jevons (1870b), 214–15.

55. See Mill (1843a), Book II, chapter 2, section 1.

56. Venn (1876b), 47.

57. See Mill (1843a), 219.

58. Venn (1876b), 48.

59. Venn (1876b), 49. Venn did not explicitly indicate what he considered the main positive recommendation for the material view and merely referred to Mill’s System of Logic and Examination of Hamilton’s Philosophy for the objections to the “conceptualist” view.

60. Venn (1876b), 51.

61. Jevons (1881a), 485.

62. Venn (1876c), 479.

63. Venn (1876c), 484.

64. Jevons (1864), 74, 76.

65. Venn (1876c), 480.

66. Venn (1876c), 481.

67. Venn (1876c), 487, 485.

68. Venn (1876c), 486.

69. Venn (1876c), 489.

70. Venn (1876c), 490.

71. Boole (1854), 50.

72. Venn (1876c), 491.

73. Peirce (1879), 235, 234.

74. Venn (1878c), 539.

75. Venn (1878c), 539.

76. Venn (1878c), 540.

77. Venn (1878c), 539. Read would identify his significant influences in the fourth edition of his Logic, Deductive and Inductive as follows: “The work may be considered, on the whole, as attached to the school of Mill; to whose System of Logic, and to Bain’s Logic, it is deeply indebted. Amongst the works of living writers, the Empirical Logic of Venn and the Formal Logic of Keynes have given me most assistance” Read (1914 [1898])], v.

78. Read (1878), 2; Anonymous (1878), 192.

79. Read (1878), 2.

80. Venn (1879a), 35–36.

81. Venn (1879a), 36; Spencer (1872), 87, my emphasis.

82. Venn (1879a), 37.

83. Venn (1879a), 37, 36.

84. Venn (1879a), 37–38.

85. Venn (1879a), 39.

86. Venn (1879a), 40, 41.

87. Venn (1879a), 41.

88. Venn (1879a), 42.

89. Venn (1879a), 46–47.

90. Venn (1879b), 427.

91. Venn (1879b), 427–28.

92. Venn (1879c), 580.

93. Venn (1879c), 580.

94. Venn (1879c), 580. Venn found fault, especially, with Boole’s philosophical remarks on the analogy between the propositions on the primary and secondary interpretations and their relation to space and time. See Boole (1854), chapter 11.

95. Venn (1879c), 580.

96. See William Stanley Jevons to John Venn, 25 March 1876, GCA, Venn Papers, C45/2c. The Jevons-Venn connection is explored in more detail in chapter 11.

97. Venn (1879c), 581. In a letter of March 1876 Jevons replied to a letter by Venn, in which he asked whether he could show Jevons’s “machine” to his students at Cambridge. See William Stanley Jevons to John Venn, 25 March 1876, GCA, Venn Papers C45/2c.

98. Venn (1879c), 581.

99. Venn, “Annals,” 145. A few years earlier, in 1877–78, Venn had received a request “from the editor of the same American periodical to write a long article on “‘Chance’ for him” (Venn, “Annals,” 145).

100. Venn (1880a), 248.

101. Venn (1880a), 249.

102. Venn (1880a), 249–50.

103. Venn (1880a), 250, 254.

104. Venn (1880a), 267.

Chapter 9

1. Venn (1881a), viii.

2. Grattan-Guinness (2011), 361; Jevons (1881b), 234.

3. Venn, “Annals,” 97; Venn (1876c), 479.

4. Venn (1876c), 479.

5. Venn (1881a), 35.

6. It was already in 1862, having been offered the post of catechist, and starting to prepare lectures, that Venn first engaged with, rather than merely read, Boole’s work. See Venn, “Annals,” 119.

7. Venn, “Annals,” 97; Venn (1889a), 34.

8. See Grattan-Guinness (2011), 367; and Venn (1881a), preface.

9. Venn (1894), vii.

10. John Venn to J. H. Hunter, 4 February 1883, CMS Venn, C42; Venn (1881a), viii.

11. Venn (1881a), xxvi.

12. Venn (1881a), xxvi.

13. Venn (1881a), ix, x. A more detailed discussion followed in chapter 4 (“On the Choice of Symbolic Language”). See, for example, Grattan-Guinness (1988) and Peckhaus (1999) for an overview of nineteenth-century views on the relation between logic, on the one hand, and philosophy and mathematics, on the other.

14. See Venn (1880a), 248.

15. Venn (1881a), x–xi. Venn implicitly referred to the work of George Peacock, Duncan F. Gregory, and other so-called symbolic algebraists. For a discussion of the development of this tradition, see, for example, Verburgt (2016).

16. Venn (1881a), xvi.

17. Venn (1881a), preface; Monro (1881), 574.

18. Jevons (1881b), 233; Jevons (1881a), 486; Venn (1881b).

19. Jevons (1881a), 486.

20. Venn (1881a), 191. Venn’s Symbolic Logic is greatly marred by the fact that the notions “class” (and the symbols X, Y, Z) and “compartment” (and the symbols x, y, z) are often used interchangeably. The rationale behind the distinction is obvious: when a class is subdivided into x and not-x, one part might fail to be represented, but not both. Suppose that one part (say x) fails to be represented, then it cannot be that it is subdivided again into two subparts so that one of them would not fail to contain members. Venn’s “slip” seems to have been deliberate, however, as he wrote that it would be “pedantically at variance with ordinary usage to insist upon never speaking of anything but compartments. I shall therefore freely use such expressions as ‘the class xyzw’, and so forth” (Venn [1881a], 111).

21. Venn (1881a), 196.

22. Venn (1881a), 192.

23. Venn (1881a), 227–28.

24. Venn (1881a), 294.

25. Venn (1881a), 324.

26. Venn (1881a), x.

27. Venn (1881a), 68.

28. Venn (1881a), 310.

29. Venn (1881a), 126.

30. Venn (1881a), 126.

31. Venn (1881a), 160. On the treatment of particulars by Boole, Jevons, Venn, Ladd-Franklin, and Schröder, see, for example, Shearman (1906), 56–59.

32. Venn (1881a), 169. Cf. Venn (1894), 188–89.

33. Venn (1881a), 103.

34. Venn, “Annals,” 119. Among the books that Venn had to prepare was William Thomson’s Outline of the Laws of Thought (1842), which contained a discussion of the representation of “the terms of a cognition by circles, whose mutual position expresses the position of the conceptions in the type as to each other” (W. Thomson [1842], 111). See A. W. F. Edwards (2004) and Shin (1994) for accessible accounts of Venn’s “cogwheels of the mind,” as Venn diagrams are called in the title of A. W. F. Edwards (2004) and, for example, Bennett (2015), Baron (1969), and Gardner (1983) for their history.

35. John Venn to Laura Forster, 30 March 1917, SGL Venn. Venn referred to the habit of rationalizing and visualizing things as “the ways of ‘wranglers’” in the context of Jane Austen’s books, the characters and events of which he liked “to put in the times & place.” See Cook (2005) for a discussion of visual reasoning in late Victorian Britain, in which Venn’s diagrams are placed into the Cambridge tradition of geometrical mathematics and compared with Galton’s photographic technique to visualize statistical averages and Marshall’s economic curves. It may here be noted that in their correspondence Venn and Galton spoke of logical diagrams and “visualized numerals” and that at one point in Symbolic Logic Venn compared logical diagrams with the “graphical method of curves” (Venn [1881a], 259).

36. Venn (1880b), 343–44, my emphasis.

37. See, for example, Moktefi and Shin (2012) for an in-depth comparison of Euler and Venn diagrams.

38. Venn (1881a), xxx, 108, 108n1.

39. Venn’s paper of December 1880 with this title (Venn [1880e]) was reproduced as section 2 of chapter 20 (“Historic Notes”) of Symbolic Logic. Section 1 of that same chapter (“On the Various Notations Adopted for Expressing the Common Propositions of Logic”) was a reproduction of another paper of December 1880 with that same title (Venn [1880d]).

40. Venn (1880c), 2. Venn first used Euler diagrams in his two papers of July 1880 (Venn [1880b]; Venn [1880c]). In the paper in Mind, the diagrams were introduced to illustrate the “class inclusion and exclusion” view of the import of propositions and to show that the resulting scheme of five propositional forms did not fit with the “old one of four” (Venn [1880b], 339). Venn attached a note in which he acknowledged that Joseph Diez Gergonne, Friedrich Ueberweg, and Friedrich Albert Lange had made more or less the same point before him.

41. At this point, Venn took issue with logicians ranging from Thomson and Ueberweg to De Morgan and Jevons, who all proposed to use dotted lines to indicate uncertainty as to where the boundary between circles should lie. “Any modifications of this sort,” wrote Venn, “seem to me . . . wholly mis-aimed and ineffectual. If we want to represent our uncertainty about the correct employment of a diagram, the only consistent way is to draw all the figures which are covered by the assigned propositions and say frankly that we do not know which is the appropriate one” (Venn [1880e], 50; see also Venn [1880b], 342).

42. Venn (1880c), 4.

43. Venn (1880c), 4n1, 5. See also Venn (1881a), 104n1. As Venn wrote about the attempt to represent diagrammatically the combinations of more than three terms: “The only serious attempt that I have seen in this way is by Bolzano. He was evidently trying under the right conception, viz. to construct diagrams which should illustrate all the combinations producible by the class terms employed, but he adopted an impracticable method in using modified Eulerian diagrams” (Venn [1880e], 50).

44. Venn (1881a), 121. See also Venn (1880c), 16; and Jevons (1874), 94–96.

45. Venn (1881a), 105.

46. Venn (1881a), 108.

47. Venn (1880c), 6.

48. Venn (1881a), 109n.

49. About Mich’s Grundriss der Logik (1871) Venn wrote that it “employs three intersecting circles to represent class subdivisions, and then shades some of these. But though he uses these compartments to illustrate propositions, the shading itself has no propositional significance” (Venn [1894], 513n1). Venn already referred to Scheffler in the index of bibliographical references of the first edition of Symbolic Logic (Venn [1881a], 442), but a footnote was added only in the second edition (Venn [1894], 123n1). As Edwards writes: “Venn need not have been quite so sensitive [for his] own contribution, which fully justifies our attaching his name to the general diagram” (A. W. F. Edwards [2004], 13).

50. Venn (1881a), 113.

51. Venn (1881a), 124.

52. Venn (1894), 131. There is a widespread belief that Venn did not address particular propositions (or “existentials”), which is probably due to the fact that Venn did not address them either in his July 1880 paper for the Philosophical Magazine or in the first edition of Symbolic Logic and which was probably transmitted by C. S. Peirce (see Moktefi and Pietarinen [2015], 362).

53. Venn (1883), 599.

54. Venn (1887a), 54.

55. See J. N. Keynes (1894), 136–42; Johnson (1921), 151–54.

56. See Venn (1887a).

57. Venn (1894), 130.

58. See Venn (1894), 208, 376. Venn’s diagram with a cross on it was reproduced by Carroll in his Symbolic Logic (1896), 179, where he wrote of a solution to a problem that “has been kindly supplied to me by Mr. Venn himself” (without giving the date of the unpreserved letter).

59. Macfarlane (1881), 64.

60. William Stanley Jevons to Herbert Jevons, 25 May 1865, quoted in Jevons (1886), 205. Jevons first constructed a logical machine in the year 1869 (announced in Jevons [1869], 60, and described in Jevons [1870c]). This instrument was preceded by the logical slate and abacus (first announced in the abovementioned letter, and described in Jevons [1866]; and Jevons [1869], 54–59). See, for example, J. M. Baldwin (1997) for a detailed description of Jevons’s machines; and Maas (2005), chapter 6, for a contextualization.

61. John Venn to William Stanley Jevons, 25 March 1876, JRULM JFP, JA6/2/358.

62. William Stanley Jevons to John Venn, 26 March 1876, GCA, Venn Papers, C45/2.

63. John Venn to William Stanley Jevons, 28 March 1876, JRULM JFP, JA6/2/359.

64. Venn (1881a), 121.

65. Venn (1881a), 121.

66. Venn (1881a), 120.

67. Venn (1881a), 122. Venn repeated the statement in the second edition of Symbolic Logic (Venn [1894], 135).

68. Francis Galton to John Venn, 7 July 1880, GCA, Venn Papers, C32/1.

69. Jevons (1881b), 233.

70. See Marquand (1881). About Marquand’s diagram, Venn wrote that “of course there is not the help to the eye here [but] if we had occasion to work out problems involving 8 or 10 terms, such a scheme would be a most valuable resource” (Venn [1894], 140).

71. Marquand (1885), 304.

72. Venn (1894), 137. See also Peirce (1887). Marquand did produce a circuit diagram for his logical machine—which marked a significant, albeit little-known, step in computing engineering theory—but it is not known whether an electrical logical machine was actually built. See, in this regard, for example, Ketner and Stewart (1985). As J. M. Baldwin captured the advantages of Marquand’s machine: “For problems of ten terms Venn would require a new diagram of complicated form, and 1,024 keys to operate the instrument. . . . Marquand’s machine for ten terms needs only 124 letters and twenty-two keys” (J. M. Baldwin [1997], 80).

73. Venn (1894), 137.

74. Since the discussion between Desmond MacHale and Quine, the history of (modern) logic has often been couched in terms of the question whether Boole or Frege “fathered” modern logic. See Quine (1995 [1985]). The case of Venn shows that an answer wholly depends on one’s understanding of modern logic. See van Heijenoort (1967a) and (1967b) for the classical account of the introduction of Leibniz’s calculus ratiocinator and lingua characteristica universalis into the history of modern logic in the dispute between Schröder and Frege. See Peckhaus (2004a) and Sluga (1987) for a criticism of van Heijenoort.

75. Venn (1894), 533.

76. Moktefi (2017), 42. Venn’s correspondence of the early 1880s contains some two letters related to the search for old and rare works in logic: Alexander Bain to John Venn, 16 December 1880, GCA, Venn Papers, C5/7; and J. Veitch to John Venn, 6 January 1881, GCA, Venn Papers, C76/1.

77. See Francis (1889) for the catalogue; and Boswell (1995) for a description and contextualization of the Venn collection in the Cambridge University Library. As Francis wrote about the collection in his in memoriam of Venn: “The formation of it cost many years of constant attention and as the subject was one that had been little taken up by bibliographers the task of collection demanded great special knowledge as well as much labour and thought” (Francis [1923], 122).

78. William Stanley Jevons to John Venn, 11 May 1881, GCA, Venn Papers, C45/5.

79. Jevons (1874), 39; Venn (1881a), xxxin.1. See Venn (1881a), xxx–xxxi. Ellis found the parallel during his editorial work for Francis Bacon’s Novum Organon (in The Works of Francis Bacon, volume 1, of 1858) but gave the wrong page number. Robert Harley, Boole’s first biographer, subsequently found other relevant passages in Leibniz.

80. Venn (1881a), xxxii. Venn mentioned the anticipations of Boole’s principles and results that he had discovered in footnotes at the appropriate places in Symbolic Logic. He made an exception for Lambert, to whom he dedicated some three pages in the introduction. The phrase “incomparable man” was used by Kant to characterize Lambert in a letter to Johann Bernoulli of 16 November 1781, quoted in Zweig (1999), 186.

81. Venn (1881a), xxxiv–xxxvi.

82. Jevons (1881b), 233.

83. Venn (1881b), 141.

84. Venn (1894), 482. See also Venn (1881c); Venn (1883); and Venn (1894), 475–76. For Venn’s brief exchange with Mitchell, see Mitchell and Venn (1884); and Venn (1884a).

85. Venn (1894), 491, 483. Unlike those of Peirce, Schröder, Johnson, and Keynes, the contributions of Mitchell and Ladd-Franklin were mentioned only in the chapter “Historic Notes” and not incorporated into the body of the text.

86. Venn (1894), 480.

87. Venn (1881a), xxxviii. See also Venn (1894), preface. The index to Symbolic Logic included a list of the papers “specially symbolic in a logical sense,” which Venn had consulted. See Venn (1881a), 439–43.

88. Venn (1886), 369–70.

89. Venn (1881a), xxviii–xxix.

90. Venn (1881b), 141.

91. Whitehead (1898), 115. Thus, as Venn wrote in the first edition of Symbolic Logic, “other writers have spoken of their ‘systems,’ and contrasted them with that of Boole; but at present there is, I think, only one thing before the world which can . . . be called a system . . . and this is exclusively due to Boole” (Venn [1881a], xxviii–xxix).

92. Venn (1894), esp. viii. See Venn (1884b). See Venn (1883) for his review of Peirce’s Studies.

93. See Venn (1894), 185, 196–97. Rather than for the copula, Peirce and Schröder introduced the writing of a bar to indicate negation for a new symbol that looked like a combination of the mathematical symbols “=” and “>.” See also Venn (1883), where he wrote that the “most important and characteristic point insisted on in this volume [i.e., Peirce’s Studies in Logic] is the necessity of introducing an additional form of copula . . . for the due expression of particular propositions (Venn [1883], 596).

94. See Venn (1894), viii, 389, 446, 493. Among the regular contributors to the Educational Times (launched in 1847 by the College of Preceptors in London to deal with general educational questions at school and university level) were algebraic logicians like Ladd-Franklin, Dodgson (Carroll), and MacColl (see Grattan-Guinness [1992]). Thony Christie was the first to identify Nature as a source for logic and its history by drawing attention to five letters from MacColl, two from Venn, and two review essays from Jevons—all from 1881. See Christie (1990); and Verburgt (2020b).

95. Cf. Jevons (1874), 74, 86; Venn (1881a), xxvii.

96. Schröder (1880), 86 (English translation taken from Dudman [1969], 145); Venn (1881a), 36n1. Venn referred to Schröder’s review in Venn (1894), 453n1. As Venn added: “The . . . discussion, though entirely re-written, is in substantial agreement with that of the first edition” (Venn [1894], 465).

97. Venn (1894), 454n1, 473. In Symbolic Logic, Venn suggested that post-Leibnizian logicians had adopted the “intensional” attitude tacitly and that the Dutch-born logician Castillon, rather than Jevons, was the first and only logician to ever develop it consistently. Venn mentioned the essay of Castillon (1747–1814) “Sur un nouvel algorithme logique” (1803) in the list of reference in the first edition of Symbolic Logic, where he added that “every effort to discover [its] existence in this country, or to obtain [it] from abroad, has proved fruitless” (Venn [1881a], 443). In a miscellaneous note published in Mind in July 1881, he informed the readers that “accident brought the work into my hands” (Venn [1881c], 447). In the second edition of Symbolic Logic, Venn expanded on his statement, writing that Castillon’s was the only fully consistent scheme of “pure intension” (Venn [1894], 465). Thiel (1975) pointed out that by writing “C. F. Castillon” Venn confused Frédéric-Adolphe-Maximilien-Gustave Salvemini de Castillon with his father, Giovanni Francesco Mauro Melchiore Salvemini.

98. Venn (1881a), 400, 402. The term “logic of relatives” appeared in the subtitle of chapter 19 (“Variations in Symbolic Procedure”) in the first edition of Symbolic Logic. Venn rejected the attempt because of the “immensely extensive signification of the word relation, and the consequent variety of symbolic procedure which is called for if we attempt to treat it symbolically” (Venn [1881a], 402). But, as Venn added: “I am here only making a few remarks upon a subject . . . which would need a separate work for its adequate discussion” (Venn [1881a], 400). The term “logic of relatives” occurred only once in the second edition, where the title of the abovementioned chapter was changed into “Intensive interpretation in general” (see Venn [1894], xvii). See Merrill (1978) on the logic of relations.

99. Venn (1881a), xxviii.

100. Venn (1881a), 415. See also Venn (1894), 493–94.

101. See Verburgt (2020b) for a detailed account of the Venn-MacColl dispute in Nature.

102. For example, Venn and Jevons did not recognize MacColl’s point that, unlike Boole’s, his propositional calculus was not based on the class calculus. For the brief MacColl-Jevons-Venn exchange in Nature, see, most importantly, Jevons (1881a); MacColl (1881); and Venn (1881b). See, for example, Rahman and Redmond (2008) for an account of MacColl’s contributions to logic.

103. MacColl (1881), 125.

104. John Venn to William Stanley Jevons, 27 July 1876, JRULM JFP, JA6/2.

105. There was one context in which Venn sided more with MacColl (and Frege) than with his fellow Booleans, namely in his treatment of hypotheticals, which Venn mentioned briefly with reference to the “barbershop” or “Alice” problem, which had been formulated and circulated by Carroll among “logical friends” in 1892–93. “Mr McColl, and Dr Frege,” Venn wrote, “have recognized that it is quite necessary to divest the proposition ‘If A then B’ of any suggestion of necessary connexion between A and B. . . . We must [similarly] admit that the phrase ‘x implies y’ does not imply that the facts concerned are known to be connected, or that the one proposition is formally inferrible [sic] from the other. This particular aspect of the question will very likely be familiar to some of my readers from a problem recently circulated, for comparison of opinions, amongst logicians” (Venn [1894], 242, 442). See Moktefi (2007) on the barbershop problem (which Venn called the “Alice problem”). See Rahman (2000) on MacColl’s criticism of Boole’s treatment of hypotheticals; and Abeles (2014) for a broader view of hypotheticals in British logic.

106. All reviews are reprinted in Frege (1972). For Venn’s original review, see Venn (1880f).

107. Venn (1894), 493, xxx. As Schröder remarked in his long and hostile review of Frege’s Begriffschrift: “I have to raise the objection that this work seems to stand far too isolated, and that it not only fails to attempt any serious contact with efforts which have been made in much the same direction—namely those of Boole—but in fact seems to ignore them completely” (Schröder translated in Dudman [1969], 142). Frege defended himself against these and other charges coming from Schröder in some three essays that dealt specifically with Boole’s algebraic logic (see Sluga [1987]).

108. Venn (1894), xxx. Frege, essentially, wished to complete Leibniz’s calculus ratiocinator with a lingua characteristica. The reception of Leibniz among nineteenth-century logicians is discussed in Peckhaus (2012).

109. Venn (1880f).

110. Venn (1880f).

111. Jan Von Plato refers to Skolem’s famous paper of 1920 (“Logico-combinatorial investigations on the satisfiability or provability of mathematical propositions, together with a theorem on dense sets”) as “the crowning achievement of algebraic logic.” Von Plato (2017), 86.

112. See Broad (1966 [1957]).

Chapter 10

1. Henry Venn to John Venn, 6 June 1910, GCA, Venn Papers, C11/10.

2. John Venn to Albert Venn Dicey, 2 May 1919, GUL Dicey, Ms.Gen.508/26. See Stockton (1980) and Clewlow (2007) for an analysis of the gradual ascendency of Venn’s independent identity, and the guarded rejection of that of his father.

3. As Bishop Wilberforce of Winchester, with whom Henry Venn of CMS had often crossed swords, wrote in January 1873: “I feel his death to be the breaking of no ordinary tie; his father baptized me and lived and died an honoured and beloved friend of my father and mother. . . . I honour especially in him the dedication of a life to a noble cause with an uncompromising entireness of devotion which had in it all the elements of true Christian heroism. You must look on his life as a grand epic poem which has ended in an euthanasia of victory and rest.” Wilberforce quoted in Knight (2009 [1882]), 384. Even Henry Venn’s nephew Fitzjames Stephen described him as “the most triumphant man I ever knew. . . . Somehow his life was so bold, so complete, and so successful that I did not feel the least as if his death was a thing to be sad about” (Fitzjames Stephen quoted in L. Stephen [1895], 87, 300).

4. See John Venn (of Hereford) to Charles Clayton, 29 November 1875, CMS Venn, C37. The connection was probably in association with Venn’s articles on material logic, in which he referred to both Sidgwick’s and Spencer’s work.

5. See Albert Venn Dicey to John Venn, 23 March 1919, GCA, Venn Papers, C25/27; and John Venn to Albert Venn Dicey, 2 April 1919, GUL Dicey, MS.Gen.508/26.

6. John Venn to Albert Venn Dicey, 2 April 1919, GUL Dicey, MS.Gen.508/26; John Venn to Albert Venn Dicey, 15 April 1919, GUL Dicey, MS.Gen.508/27. When she wrote her son Archibald Venn of the existence of Annals in 1917, Susanna Venn tried to convince him to urge his father to continue the personal biography. See Susanna Carnegie Venn to John Archibald Venn, GCA, Venn Papers, C7/31a.

7. John Venn to Albert Venn Dicey, 15 April 1919, GUL Dicey, MS.Gen.508/27. See also Henry Venn to John Venn, 6 June 1910, GCA, Venn Papers, C11/10.

8. Clewlow (2007), 154.

9. L. Stephen (1895), 309.

10. Venn (1904a), 174; Venn, “Annals,” 16.

11. John Venn to Laura Forster, 2 June 1903, SGL Venn.

12. John Venn to Laura Forster, 23 August 1903, SGL Venn. John and Henrietta Venn’s different religious developments apparently placed a bar to complete confidence between them. It was Caroline Emilia Stephen who became her closest confidante, and when Henrietta developed terminal cancer in 1901, it was “Carrie” who moved to spend nine months near to the women she herself described as being like a sister (see Clewlow [2007], 151–52; Tod [1978], 40).

13. See J. A. Venn (1954), 283. Venn’s brother Henry Venn of Walmer married twice: first to Isabel L. de Butts, with whom he had one son, Henry Straith Venn (1869–1908), and later to Louisa J. W. Ramsey, with whom he had six children: four daughters, who all became scholars, and two sons.

14. See Clewlow (2007), 152, for this suggestion. See also Venn, “Annals,” 121.

15. John Venn to Laura Forster, 13 March 1903, SGL Venn.

16. Henry Venn to John Venn, 6 June 1910, GCA, Venn Papers, C11/10.

17. John Venn to Laura Forster, 15 February 1903, SGL Venn.

18. John Venn to Laura Forster, 15 February 1903, SGL Venn.

19. John Venn to Albert Venn Dicey, 15 April 1919, GUL Dicey, MS.Gen.508/27.

20. John Venn to Laura Forster, 15 February 1903, SGL Venn.

21. See Winstanley (1940), 405; Winstanley (1947), 68.

22. Brooke (1985), 232.

23. Searby (1997), 273; “The resident members of Governing Body” [paper on chapel services], GCA, Ernest Stewart Roberts papers, PPC/ESR.

24. “The resident members of Governing Body” [paper on chapel services], GCA, Ernest Stewart Roberts papers, PPC/ESR.

25. CUR, 6 February 1883, 365. See Winstanley (1947), 313–14.

26. See CUR, 3 June 1884, 802.

27. John Venn to Laura Forster, 13 March 1903, SGL Venn. As Venn added in the same letter, before resigning orders “a decision one way or the other was being perpetually set before me; e.g., in the simple matter of visiting cards, was I to prefix ‘Rev.’ or not? Either way was unsatisfactory.”

28. Susanna Venn to John Venn, 26 April 1895, GCA, Venn Papers, C6/1c.

29. See Clewlow (2007), 186n156, which refers to the Aelfrida Tillyard Papers in the Memory Pictures Section at Girton College, Cambridge. Edward Byles Cowell (1826–1903), fellow of Corpus Christi, was professor of Sanskrit at Cambridge between 1867 and 1903; Cecil Bendall (1856–1906) was elected to a fellowship at Caius College in 1881 and became professor of Sanskrit at Cambridge in 1903.

30. Susanna Venn to John Venn, 26 April 1895, GCA, Venn Papers, C6/1d.

31. Susanna Venn to John Venn, 26 April 1895, GCA, Venn Papers, C6/1e.

32. Clewlow (2007), 186.

33. Venn (1870b), 93.

34. Albert Venn Dicey to John Venn, 20 May 1910, GCA, Venn Papers, C26/7a.

35. John Venn to Laura Forster, 7 January 1907, SGL Venn.

36. Susanna C. Venn’s “commonplace book” is held at the Society of Genealogists Library, Venn Collection.

37. See Henry Sidgwick to F. Myers, February 1870, TCL, Henry Sidgwick Papers, Add.Mss.c.100/206, John Venn to Laura Forster, 3 February 1903, SGL Venn.

38. John Venn to Laura Forster, 14 December 1902, SGL Venn.

39. John Venn to Laura Forster, 28 December 1910, SGL Venn, John Venn to Laura Forster, 14 December 1902, SGL Venn.

40. John Venn to Laura Forster, 3 March 1903, 30 March 1906, 4 May 1906, SGL Venn.

41. Tillyard quoted in Clewlow (2007), 187. Clewlow’s reference is to the Aelfrida Tillyard Papers in the Memory Pictures Section at Girton College, Cambridge.

42. Caian 9, no. 3 (Easter term, 1900), 208. See Henrietta Venn to Henry Venn of Canterbury, 12 June 1900, SGL Venn.

43. On the Society for Psychical Research, see, for example, Oppenheim (1985), chapter 4; Schultz (2004), chapter 5.

44. See Gauld (1968), 137–40.

45. John Venn to Laura Forster, 15 February 1903, SGL Venn.

46. Venn quoted in S. C. Venn (1895), 104.

47. Venn was chosen by Stout, the editor of Mind’s new series, along with Ward, Sidgwick, and William Wallace. See Passmore (1976), 25. The Logic of Chance, Symbolic Logic, and The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic all appeared at Macmillan—the publisher founded in 1843, which also launched Nature, in 1869 (see Lightman [2007], 389–90). For an account of the vexed issue of the professionalization of Victorian science in the context of institutions and periodicals, see, for example, Barton (2003) and Cantor et al. (2004).

48. Anonymous (1881), 234. Venn was nominated as a candidate for the Fellowship of the Royal Society in March 1882; he was accepted in June 1883, with his correspondent and later collaborator Francis Galton as one of the signatories. See “Certificates of Election and Candidature,” Royal Society of London Archives, EC/1883/15. See Boas Hall (1984) for an account of the Royal Society in Victorian Britain.

49. John Venn to Henry Hunter, 4 February 1883, CMS Venn, C42.

50. CUR, 1 December 1896, 261.

51. John Venn to Henry Hunter, 4 February 1883, CMS Venn, C42.

52. See CUR, 2 October 1883, 2; Cambridge Review, 17 October 1883, 7.

53. Caian 8, no. 1 (Easter term, 1898), 7. See Gesta 1885–93, interleaved letter from John Venn 16 February 1887, GCA, GOV/03/01/13. The new catechist was the Reverend A. M. Knight, whose title, so far as it related to his duties as lecturer, was “Theological Lecturer and Catechist.”

54. See Whitaker (1996), 194. Since 1889—the year in which a report from the Special Moral Sciences Board was presented to the Senate by the vice-chancellor—students could receive a BA degree on the weighty part 1 alone, and few had chosen to go on to part 2. Moreover, students from other triposes had been able since that same year to enter part 2 directly.

55. See Winstanley (1947), 189.

56. See, for example, Groenewegen (1998), section 3, for details on the reform of the Moral Sciences Tripos in the 1880s and 1890s.

57. J. N. Keynes, diary entry 7 December 1881, quoted in Groenewegen (1998), 79. The other examiners referred to were Thomas Woodhouse Levin, J. S. Reid, and Arthur Lyttelton.

58. John Venn to Francis Galton, 8 May 1888, UCL FG, 3/3/21/2, F26–28.

59. The Wykeham Professorship of Logic was established in 1859. The former holder of the chair was Thomas Fowler, who had been appointed to it in 1873.

60. Albert Venn Dicey to John Venn, 10 January 1889, CMS Venn, C41/5.

61. Albert Venn Dicey to John Venn, 11 February 1889, CMS Venn, C41/6.

62. Albert Venn Dicey to John Venn, 10 January 1889, CMS Venn, C41/5. Dicey at first suggested to obtain testimonials from Mill (who had died in 1873) and Fitzjames Stephen but later preferred a list of references instead.

63. See “J. V. to the electors (draft),” [n.d.], CMS Venn, C41/4.

64. “J. V. to the electors (draft),” [n.d.], CMS Venn, C41/4.

65. Albert Venn Dicey to Susanna Venn, 13 February 1889, CMS Venn, C41/2.

66. Venn (1888a), 114.

67. Venn (1888a), 116.

68. Venn (1876a), 22. See also Venn (1888a), 23.

69. Venn (1876a), 22–23. See also Venn (1888a), 23–24.

70. Venn (1876a), 24. See also Venn (1888a), 23.

71. Venn (1876a), 29. See also Venn (1888a), 30.

72. See Venn (1887a).

73. On Galton’s and Edgeworth’s “English breakthrough” in the history of statistics, see Stigler (1986), chapters 8–10.

74. Galton paraphrased in “Discussion on Dr. Venn’s paper” in Venn (1891a), 452. A similar sentiment about statistics was voiced a year earlier by the then late president of the Royal Statistical Society Graham Balfour. See Balfour (1889).

75. Venn and Galton (1890), 453; Galton (1889c), 42.

76. See, for example, Kruskal and Stigler (1997) for an account of (Venn’s and Galton’s place within) the history of “normal” in statistics.

77. On the Quetelet-Galton connection, see, for example, Hilts (1973).

78. Venn (1876a), 33. See also Venn (1888a), 43.

79. Venn (1876a), 38. See also Venn (1888a), 42.

80. See Stigler (1986), 221.

81. Venn (1876a), 42. See also Venn (1888a), 47.

82. Stigler (1986), 238.

83. Venn (1891a), 429.

84. Galton to Alphonse de Candolle, 6 May 1888, quoted in K. Pearson (1930), 478.

85. Edgeworth paraphrased in “Discussion on Dr. Venn’s paper,” in Venn (1891a), 453. See also Edgeworth quoted in Mirowski (1994), 47.

86. As Venn wrote in the 1876 edition of The Logic of Chance, the method of least squares “has given rise to the profoundest mathematical investigations, into which . . . I have neither the power nor the wish to enter here” (Venn [1876a], 336). In the preface Venn wrote that he was “much indebted to Mr J. W. L. Glaisher . . . for many hints and references to various publications upon the subject of Least Squares, and for careful criticism . . . of the chapter in which that subject is treated of” (Venn [1876a], xv).

87. John Venn to Francis Galton, 1 May 1887, UCL FG, 3/3/21/2, F1.

88. See Galton (1875); Galton (1877); and Venn (1889c).

89. Venn (1876a), 466.

90. These characterizations of Venn’s 1891 paper, as reported in the “Discussion on Dr. Venn’s paper,” came from, respectively, Edgeworth and Frederick Hendriks, then vice president of the Royal Statistical Society (see Venn [1891a], 448).

91. Venn (1888a), xviii, John Venn to Francis Galton, 27 November 1889, UCL FG, 3/3/21/2, F56–59. For the Theory of Statistics syllabus, Venn even had something of a collaboration with Edgeworth in mind, for as he wrote to Galton: “If it were desirable to go into the mathematical foundation of the various rules no one would do it better than Edgeworth” (John Venn to Francis Galton, 23 February 1890, UCL FG, 3/3/21/2, F68–71).

92. John Venn to Francis Galton, 25 April 1896, UCL FG, 3/3/21/2, F79–81. Edgeworth was never elected to the Royal Society. Galton was greatly impressed with Edgeworth’s work and sought on at least three occasions, with the assistance of Venn and others, to gain election to the Royal Society for Edgeworth. Venn’s difficulty in articulating Edgeworth’s contributions would be shared by many later commentators.

93. Stigler (1999), 87. Stigler gives the details of the Edgeworth-Pearson controversy (Stigler [1986], 329–33), whose “The Empirical Proof of the Law of Error” (1887), by Edgeworth, and “Asymmetrical Frequency Curves” (1893), Pearson’s first statistical paper, were written in response to Venn’s letter. Edgeworth would soon be overshadowed and “erased” from history by Pearson, who mentioned Edgeworth only twice in his massive and meticulous biography of Galton.

94. John Venn to Francis Galton, 23 February 1890, UCL FG, 3/3/21/2, F68–71.

95. John Venn to Francis Galton, 21 August 1891, UCL FG, 3/3/21/2, F75–77.

96. See Karl Pearson to John Venn, 28 February 1893, GCA, Venn Papers, C58/1. As Pearson’s son, E. S. Pearson, explained the circumstances: “In the year 1890, Pearson, then Professor of Applied Mathematics at University College, London, was appointed to the part-time professorship in Geometry at Gresham College. . . . The duties . . . seem to have consisted in giving some dozen end-of-the-day lectures each year to a semi-popular audience. The first eight lectures which Pearson gave on the ‘Scope and Methods of Science’ were later developed into his book The Grammar of Science; the lectures were . . . followed by twelve on ‘The Geometry of Statistics,’ twelve on ‘The Laws of Chance’ and finally in 1893–94 by ten on ‘The Geometry of Chance.’” E. S. Pearson (1966 [1956]), 252.

97. Karl Pearson to John Venn, 24 March 1893, GCA, Venn Papers, C58/3. As Pearson wrote in the same letter: “Would you object to my entitling your lecture ‘On Frequency Curves; their Nature, Rarity, Use, etc.’? I have used the word ‘frequency curve’ for any curve in which the frequency of any divergence from the mean is plotted up to that divergence. I had found the current term ‘curve of error’ rather confusing with a popular audience, who did not first reach the subject from the standpoint of errors of observation.”

98. See, for example, Sviedrys (1970); Harman (1985); and Warwick (2003).

99. As Crampton wrote: “There is absolutely no mention whatever of Ward and Venn applying for ‘psychophysical apparatus’ either in the minute book of the Board for Moral Sciences or in the proceedings of the Council of the Senate. . . . The only conclusion to be drawn is that Ward and Venn’s efforts were conducted at an unofficial level” (Crampton [1978], 58). In their pamphlet of 1886, Venn and Ward added another dimension to this conclusion: “Some years ago, when this Board was called upon by the General Board of Studies to state in what respects further University provision for the study of the Moral Sciences was desirable, it was agreed that the Board should apply among others for a sum of money to be expended on apparatus for psychophysical experiments. This recommendation of the Board was, however, afterwards withdrawn . . . mainly because at that time the need of additional teaching in the department of Political Economy was still more urgently felt” (Venn and Ward quoted in Crampton [1978], 72).

100. Ward’s “An Attempt to Interpret Fechner’s Law” (1876) examined the logical consequences for physiology, philosophy and psychology of Fechner’s famous psychophysical work. Fechner’s experiments had only once before been presented in English—in James Sully’s Sensation and Intuition of 1874. Because there were not any jobs available in the moral sciences, in 1876 Ward saw himself forced to go to Germany, where he hoped to set up a demonstration laboratory for teaching purposes, just as James had done in America. In May 1877, Ward returned to Cambridge.

101. See Bartlett (1937), 98.

102. “For Members of the Moral Sciences Board (6 May 1886),” quoted in Crampton (1978), 72.

103. The minutes of the General Board of Studies (9 June 1891), quoted in Crampton (1978), 59.

104. The minutes of the Council of the Senate (23 June 1898), quoted in Crampton (1978), 59.

105. Cattell’s family correspondence quoted in Sokal (1972), 146.

106. See Cattell quoted in Sokal (1972), 146. As Sokal adds here, Thomson allowed Cattell to use various of the laboratory’s own equipment in his work, and Sidgwick later donated a considerable sum for the support of the laboratory and the purchase of some additional apparatus. See also Cattell (1928).

107. Venn (1888a), 199.

108. The connection is a historically and theoretically complex one. There were strong overlaps between Galton’s mental tests to study human intelligence and Wundt’s psychophysical techniques, but they were also separated by conceptual gaps. See, for example, the discussion between Galton and Cattell in Cattell (1890). Popple and Dennis (2000) provide a brief account of the discussion.

109. See S. Gibson (2019), chapter 7, for a discussion. The Archives of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, found in the Whipple Library, Cambridge, contain several documents related to this story.

110. See Galton (1885).

111. Venn (1889b), 141.

112. See Venn (1893). In 1887, the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company published a catalogue of anthropometric apparatus designed in collaboration with Galton. Many instruments had been adjusted since the South Kensington laboratory in response to Cambridge feedback.

113. See, in this regard, Galton (1888); and Venn (1889b). The total number of students measured at Cambridge was 1,450, but in the tables, there appeared only 1,095, “as deductions had to be made for those about whose position in the [three ‘intellectual categories’] there was some uncertainty, and for other causes” (Venn [1889b], 146). See also John Venn to Francis Galton, 23 September 1887, 7 November 1887, 5 January 1888, 6 February 1888, 16 February 1888, 26 February 1888 and 1 March 1888, UCL FG, 3/3/21/2, F8–11/F12–14/F15/F16/F17–19/F21/F25.

114. See “F. M. T.” (1889); and “H. J. P.” (1889). See also John Venn to Francis Galton, 20 October 1889. UCL FG, 3/3/21/2, F49–51. Gibson has identified “F. M. T.” as Frederick Meadows Turner (see S. Gibson [2019], 326).

115. See Galton (1889a) and John Venn to Francis Galton, 4 August 1889, UCL FG, 3/3/21/2, F42–43.

116. Galton (1889b).

117. See Venn (1889b).

118. Galton (1889b). See also John Venn to Francis Galton, 20 October 1889, 27 November 1889, UCL FG, 3/3/21/2, F49–51/F56–59.

119. John Venn to Francis Galton, 20 October 1889, UCL FG, 3/3/21/2, F49–51. Also, on 1 March 1888 Venn asked Galton: “Would it be possible to test the average, discrepancy between the ‘Pull’ & ‘Squeeze’ results at Kensington & Cambridge? If your former instruments are in existence & physically injured they might be sent to Cambridge & tried in 40 or 50 cases. . . . If it was in London one would like to have your former superintendent to see that his instruments were used according to his method for fair comparison. But perhaps when you are next in Cambridge you would see Mr. White & ascertained exactly what measure of difference can be allowed for difference of usage.” John Venn to Francis Galton, 1 March 1888, UCL FG, 3/3/21/2, F25.

120. See John Venn to Francis Galton, 25 May 1889, UCL FG, 3/3/21/2, F36–38, and Francis Galton to John Venn, 24 May 1889, UCL FG, 3/3/21/2, F37–41.

121. John Venn to Francis Galton, 20 October 1889, UCL FG, 3/3/21/2, F49–51.

122. Venn and Galton (1890), 453.

123. See Stigler (1986), 271, where he calls it “the most used (and abused) method of scaling psychological tests,” adding: “The argument for the scale was, and remains, weak: It rested solely on analogy. The statistical scale is assumed to be appropriate for talent because it is appropriate for stature. . . . Using this inferred scale, [Galton] could distinguish between men’s abilities on a numerical scale rather than claim that they were indistinguishable.”

124. Venn (1889b), 147.

125. K. Pearson (1924), 357. Hacking (1990), chapter 21, analyzed Galton’s (and Pearson’s) achievement in using statistics in replacing causation with correlation.

126. See Venn and Galton (1890). See also John Venn to Francis Galton, 16 February 1888, UCL FG, 3/3/21/2, F17–19; Venn (1889a), 149.

127. See Venn and Galton (1890), 451. See also Venn (1893); Wissler (1901); and Lee, Lewenz, and Pearson (1903). Venn’s and Galton’s Cambridge activities stopped around 1890. Some ten years later, the work was resumed by Pearson. The laboratory in the library of the Cambridge Philosophical Society finally closed in 1909.

128. See, for example, Szreter (1996), chapter 3.

129. Venn and Galton (1890), 452. The paper referred to was “On the Advisability of Assigning Marks for Bodily Efficiency in the Examination of Candidates for Those Public Services in Which Bodily Efficiency Is of Importance,” which Galton read before the Anthropological Section of the British Association in 1889. Galton obtained a report from the council of that body in favor of the proposal in the following year.

130. Venn (1893), 18–19. In the early 1890s, there allegedly were about 207 Indian students in Britain, with thirty at Cambridge and nine at Oxford. At Cambridge, the enterprise that brought Indian students was the development of courses for Indian Civil Service probationers; lectures in Hindustani and Persian for such candidates began in 1873, and in 1883 a Board of Indian Civil Service Studies was set up. See Salzman (1959), 267; and Visram (1984), chapter 8.

131. Venn (1893), 18.

132. Venn (1893), 19.

Chapter 11

1. Passmore (1957), 135.

2. See J. Dewey (1890).

3. See Venn (1879b) and Venn (1894) for Venn’s positive accounts of the work of Sigwart and Wundt. Venn praised the second volume of Wundt’s Logik, on methodology, as “an astonishing product of ability and industry” (Venn [1884d], 451).

4. Venn (1889a), v.

5. See Russell (1997 [1959]), 30, 146. See, in this regard, also Bell (1999); and Demey (2020).

6. John Venn to Francis Galton, 8 May 1888, UCL FG, 3/3/21/2, F26–28.

7. Venn (1889a), v. See also Annan (1984), 190, where he writes that “Stephen, Sidgwick, Clifford, Marshall and Venn all came to philosophy through mathematics and gravitated to empiricism.” Especially during the last two decades of his life, Venn often returned to the phrase “my (middle) generation,” to which for him belonged men of the early days of the Moral Sciences Tripos, such as Sidgwick, Mayor, and Pearson.

8. John Venn to Laura Forster, 3 June 1906, SGL Venn.

9. Venn, “Annals,” 112.

10. John Venn to Laura Forster, 25 December 1902, SGL Venn. It might well be true that Venn regarded Boole’s work as primarily a practical invention.

11. Anonymous (1889), 344; Venn (1889a), v. For an account of the standing of Mill’s System of Logic in 1870s and 1880s Britain, see Loizides (2014), who does not mention Venn.

12. Venn (1866), 195.

13. Venn (1874), 382; Venn (1879a), 35.

14. Venn (1866), xiii.

15. Venn (1879a), 37.

16. On the history of scientific philosophy, see, for example, Friedman (2012). See Morris (2019) on Russell’s debt to the work of Sigwart, among others.

17. J. Dewey (1904), 58.

18. See, for example, Johnston (2014), chapter 3.

19. See Anonymous (1889b), 344.

20. Venn (1889a), 588.

21. Venn (1889a), 1, 22, 26. The phrase “dualistic science” appeared both in the Athenaeum review of Principles and in John Dewey’s 1890 essay “Is Logic a Dualistic Science?” (J. Dewey [1890]).

22. Anonymous (1890), 462.

23. Venn (1889a), 469.

24. See, for example, Groenewegen (2001); Hart (2012), chapter 2; and Parkin-Gounelas (2007), 201–2.

25. Venn (1889a), 16.

26. Venn (1889a), 16–17.

27. Anonymous (1889a). See, especially, Edgeworth (1890).

28. Sully (1889), 339. The psychologist Sully became Venn’s fellow coeditor of Mind’s new series (1891) and Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College (1892–1903), where he was succeeded by Read.

29. Anonymous (1890), 462; Anonymous (1889b), 344; Read (1889), 565; Sully (1889), 337, 339.

30. Read (1889), 565; Sully (1889), 337.

31. See Read (1889), 565.

32. Sully (1889), 337.

33. Read (1889), 566.

34. Read (1889), 565. Venn himself made a distinction between the more and less “purely logical parts of this volume” (Venn [1889a], 160).

35. Venn (1889a), 22. Venn used two expressions to make clear that logic was not an “ultimate science”: “derivative” and “secondary” (see Venn [1889a], 1, 10). Interestingly, a fundamental aim of the tradition of British Aristotelians (Robert Sanderson, Richard Crakanthorpe, et al.) was exactly “to determine the subjective conditions by means of which objective knowledge and science are made possible” (Sgarbi [2013], 64).

36. Anonymous (1890), 462.

37. Sully (1889), 337–38. See also Bain (1870), introduction; and J. Dewey (1890).

38. Venn (1889a), 1.

39. Sully (1889), 338.

40. Venn (1889a), 45.

41. Venn (1889a), 11.

42. Venn (1889a), 21.

43. Venn (1889a), 1, 4.

44. Venn (1889a), 4.

45. Venn (1889a), 11, 21.

46. Venn (1889a), 32, 35.

47. Venn (1889a), 37.

48. Read (1889), 567.

49. Venn (1889a), 46.

50. Venn (1889a), 46.

51. Venn (1889a), 115.

52. Anonymous (1890), 463.

53. Venn (1889a), 351.

54. Whewell (1860), 344. Cf. Mill (1843), 387. Venn (1889a), 355. See, for example, Snyder (1997) for a critical examination of Mill’s criticism of Whewell’s phrase about “happy guesses” in science.

55. See Venn (1889a), 354.

56. See Jevons (1879 [1871]), 19.

57. Venn (1889a), 358.

58. Venn (1879b), 429. Cf. Venn (1889a), 358n1.

59. Venn (1889a), 361.

60. On the Whewell–De Morgan exchange, see, for example, Panteki (2008).

61. Venn (1889a), 361. Interestingly, to rid Jevons’s position of its originality, Venn referred to the Dutch logician Franco Burgersdijk’s Institutionum logicarum libri duo (1626), in which various rules were given for the inverse process.

62. Johnson (1921), xv.

63. Venn (1889a), 374–75. See also Mill (1865), chapter 12.

64. Venn (1889a), 375–76.

65. Venn (1889a), 378.

66. Venn (1889a), 379.

67. Venn (1889a), 555.

68. Venn (1889a), 554.

69. Venn (1889a), 556.

70. The substance of chapter 25 of Principles (“Speculation and Action”) appeared in the first two editions of Logic of Chance: that is, in chapter 15 (“On Statistics as Applied to Human Actions”) of the 1866 edition and chapter 18 (“Statistics as Applied to Human Actions”) of the 1876 edition. The substance of these chapters was based on Venn’s very first article, “Science of History” (1862).

71. Venn (1889a), 565.

72. Venn (1889a), 580.

73. Venn (1889a), 581.

74. Venn (1889a), 583.

75. Venn (1889a), 583.

76. Venn (1889a), 587.

77. Venn (1889a), 565.

78. Venn (1889a), 588.

79. Venn (1889a), 559.

80. Venn, “Annals,” 112–13.

81. Venn (1889a), 589.

82. Venn (1889a), 590, 589.

83. Venn, “Science and common thought (1889),” CMS Venn, D1, 1.

84. Venn, “Science and common thought (1889),” CMS Venn, D1, 2.

85. Venn, “Science and common thought (1889),” CMS Venn, D1, 3.

86. Venn, “Science and common thought (1889),” CMS Venn, D1, 3.

87. Venn, “Science and common thought (1889),” CMS Venn, D1, 15, 5.

88. Venn, “Science and common thought (1889),” CMS Venn, D1, 18.

89. Broad (1966 [1957]), 20. See, for example, CUC (1913), xlii; McGill University Annual Calendar (1909), 140; University of Calcutta Calendar (1919), 207; Melbourne University Calendar (1922), 368. Marshall and J. N. Keynes both attended Venn’s lectures on inductive logic in 1873. Venn also set and marked J. N. Keynes’s inductive logic paper for the BSc at the University of London at the end of that same year. See Groenewegen (1998), 874; and Deane (2001), 25–26.

90. Broad (1966 [1957], 21; Monk (1994), 3; Broad (1952 [1926], 117.

91. Venn (1907), viii.

92. See Mander (2011) for a general account of British idealism. See, for example, Monk (1999) and Geach (1995) on the influence of McTaggart’s Hegelian idealism in the 1890s and first decade of the twentieth century at Cambridge.

93. Russell (1944), 10. Sorley, Stout, McTaggart, Moore, and Russell all were once students of, among others, Sidgwick and possibly Venn as well.

94. Venn (1913), 254; Russell (1997 [1959]), 30. Russell cited in Schultz (2004), 3. On a different note, Sidgwick was on the committee that awarded McTaggart a six-year fellowship in 1891 (he reportedly said of McTaggart’s writing sample of Hegel, “I can see that this is nonsense, but what I want to know is whether it is the right kind of nonsense”) (see Gouldstone [2005], 149).

95. See Hylton (1990) for an authoritative defense of this narrative, as brought into the world by Moore and Russell themselves, and, for example, Bell (1999) and Dappiano (1994) for revisionary accounts.

96. See Mander (2011), chapter 15; and T. Baldwin (1984).

97. See Schultz (2004), chapter 6; and Gibbins (2007), chapter 5.

98. Russell (1996 [1938]), 26; Russell (1997 [1959]), 30. The only philosophy that Russell read before coming up to Trinity College were all his secular godfather and “former Pope” Mill’s works, except the Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (Russell [1944], 10). Though he entirely rejected Mill’s empiricist view of mathematics, Russell’s early philosophical opinions were all derived from System of Logic (see Griffin [1991], 13).

99. Passmore (1957), 137.

100. For example, Principles of Mathematics and Principia Mathematica each held that mathematical logic had three branches—the calculus of propositions, the calculus of classes, and the calculus of relations. The logical parts of Whitehead’s Treatise on Universal Algebra of 1898 were taken from Schröder’s Operationskreis. See Moore (1998), 112; Peckhaus (2004b), 558.

101. Braithwaite (1946), 284, 283.

102. See Broad (1922a).

103. Gandon (2012), 269.

104. J. M. Keynes (1921), viii. Keynes continued by writing that “Cambridge . . . continues in direct succession the English tradition of Locke and Berkeley and Hume, of Mill and Sidgwick, who, in spite of their divergences of doctrine, are united in a preference for what is matter of fact” (J. M. Keynes [1921], viii–ix). See, for example, Broad (1918); Wrinch and Jeffreys (1919); Ramsey (1931 [1926]); Jeffreys (1939); and Von Wright (1951). A fourth volume of Johnson’s Logic on probability was never finished, but parts of it were published posthumously as an article in Mind.

105. Von Wright (1993), 114. The Cambridge invention of probabilistic inductive logic, later continued by Rudolf Carnap and others, rested on an insight that went back to Bernoulli and Laplace. As Broad put it in his review of Keynes’s Treatise on Probability in Mind: “induction cannot hope to arrive at anything more than probable conclusions and therefore the logical principles of induction must be the laws of probability” (Broad [1922b], 81).

106. Broad (1920), 20; Broad (1918), 389.

107. Misak (2016), 1. Misak provides an in-depth corrective to the standard story where “Russell, Moore, and, to a lesser extent, Wittgenstein, savaged pragmatism, leaving it never to fully recover” (Misak [2016], 1). See, in this context, also Dunham (2014); and Verburgt (2020a).

108. See, for example, Peirce (1992 [1978]), Peirce (1983 [1883]), and Peirce (1998 [1901]) for references to Venn’s work. See James (1918 [1890]), 322, for a reference to Venn. Venn, in turn, much enjoyed reading William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. See John Venn to Laura Forster, 27 January 1903, SGL Venn.

109. Robert P. Richardson to John Venn, 9 November 1915, GCA, Venn Papers, C63.

110. See Andrew W. West to John Venn, 30 April 1896, GCA, Venn Papers, C82. (Venn turned down the accompanying invitation on account of his own health and that of his family as well as on that of university engagements.)

111. Wall (2007) provides a detailed account of the establishment of and candidate for the new chair. The correspondence between Venn and Ward provides some evidence that the original plan was to have two new endowed chairs, one in Mental Philosophy and one in Logic. Somewhere along the way, financial constraints limited the expenditure to a single chair. See James Ward to John Venn, 6 March 1897, GCA, Venn Papers, C80/3.

112. James Ward to John Venn, 4 January 1897, GCA, Venn Papers, C80/1.

113. See Cambridge Chronicle, 22 January 1897, 4. Venn, apparently, understood Ward’s considerations, for on 9 January 1897, the day after the deadline for application, Ward wrote to Venn: “I have got your letter of the 6th & sincerely thank you for it. I have sent in my name to the V.C. [vice-chancellor] at the last minute” (James Ward to John Venn, 9 January 1897, GCA, Venn Papers, C80/2).

114. James Ward to John Venn, 13 March 1897, GCA, Venn Papers, C80/4.

115. John Venn to Laura Forster, 25 December 1906, SGL Venn; Venn (1907), viii.

116. See, for example, Walter F. Hillcop to John Venn, 12 January 1904, GCA, Venn Papers, C40/1, Robert P. Richardson to John Venn, 9 November 1915, GCA, Venn Papers, C63.

117. John Venn to Henry Sidgwick, 13 June 1900, TCL, Sidgwick Papers, Add.Ms.c.95/175.

Chapter 12

1. John Venn to H. T. Francis, 23 September 1915, GCA, Venn Papers, C5/5D. This chapter draws heavily on Clewlow (2007), chapter 7.

2. John Venn to Albert Venn Dicey, [n.d.] October 1885, GUL Dicey, Ms.Gen.508/18; Laura Forster, 24 December 1907, SGL Venn.

3. See Levine (1986) for the shifting boundaries between amateur and professional historians in the early and mid-Victorian era.

4. J. W. Clark to John Venn, 25 March 1909, GCA, Venn Papers, C23. At least until the 1880s and 1890s, archaeology was not clearly distinguished from subjects that soon came to be called of antiquarian interest.

5. See, for example, Burrow (1989), 138; and Wormell (1980), 120–21.

6. See Annan (1984), 339–43.

7. See Venn and Venn (1887). Already before the official start of his foray into historical and biographical work, Venn had demonstrated historical sense when he wrote the introductory biographical chapter for The Missionary Secretariat of Henry Venn (1880) together with his brother, the “Historic Notes” to Symbolic Logic (1881), and the entry on George Boole for the Dictionary of National Biography (1886).

8. The Register of Baptisms, Marriages and Burials in St. Michael’s Parish, Cambridge (1538–1837) (Venn [1891b]).

9. The Perse School: Notes from 1619 to 1864 from the Admission Registers of Gonville and Caius College and Other Sources (Venn and Venn [1890]). See also Gray (1921), where Venn is thanked for giving access to the college records and for sharing the results of some of his own researches. Between 1623 and 1678 seventy boys from the Perse School entered Caius College, of whom twenty became fellows; during the 155 years between 1678 and 1833, only two or three such admissions were recorded (see Venn [1901a], 258).

10. See Venn (1904c) and Venn (1910a).

11. See Venn (1901b); Venn (1910b); and Venn (1912). Venn’s contributions to the Caian are touched on in the section “Collegiate Genealogy.”

12. “W. B. H.” (1926), xi. See Venn (1897); Venn (1898); Venn (1901a); Venn and Venn (1922a); and Venn and Venn (1922b). A number of anticipatory extracts of Biographical History appeared in numbers of the Caian, and several years prior to the first two volumes of the first part of Alumni Cantabrigienses, father and son prepared The Book of Matriculations and Degrees (Venn and Venn [1913]).

13. Venn in Venn and Venn (1887), xxiv.

14. The Times paraphrased in J. N. Keynes (1923), 128.

15. John Venn to Henry J. Hunter, 15 June 1893, CMS Venn, C42.

16. See Clewlow (2007), 200, who also notes that it was Archibald Venn who reported to irregular meetings of a press subsyndicate on the progress being made.

17. William Ridgeway to John Venn, 6 September 1905, GCA, Venn Papers, C64/2.

18. John Venn to Laura Forster, 25 December 1906, SGL Venn. As Venn added: “I say ‘oddly’ because this is seldom a taste of early acquirement.” See Clewlow (2007), 200, for the suggestion about the circumstances of the scheme for Matriculations and Degrees. Her reference is to Venn, “Matriculations and Degrees,” 3 May 1907, University of Cambridge Archive, University Press Archive, PR.A.V. 66/1.

19. John Venn to Laura Forster, 25 December 1906, SGL Venn.

20. John Venn to John Archibald Venn, [n.d.] [probably 1922], GCA, Venn Papers, C2/42, John Venn to John Archibald Venn, 19 October 1915, GCA, Venn Papers, C2/2, John Venn to H. T. Francis, GCA, Venn Papers, C5/2.

21. See John Venn to Waller, 3 January 1921, University of Cambridge Archive, University Press Archive, PR.A.V. 65/5.

22. Stokes (1923), 126.

23. Pickles (2004). John Archibald Venn also helped to edit five volumes published between 1911 and 1916 of an admissions register of his own college to 1900 and completed the second volume of John Peile’s expansive and unfinished Biographical Register of Christ’s College (1913).

24. See, for example, Horn (1999); and Wagner (1972).

25. Grace Book A and Grace Book B had been edited for the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, respectively, in 1908 and 1903–5. Grace Books D(elta) and G(amma) were edited, in 1908 and 1910, by William George Searle and Venn.

26. See Wagner (1972), 383–84; and Dellheim (2004 [1982]), chapter 2. See also Thompson (1990), 33–36, on Venn and the Cambridge Antiquarian Society.

27. Venn and Venn (1887), xxiv; Venn (1901c), 104.

28. See, for example, John Venn to John Archibald Venn, 27 February 1919, GCA, Venn Papers, C2/27.

29. Clewlow (2007), 205. See Clewlow (2007), 205–6, on the case of William J. Harvey.

30. Venn and Venn (1887), xxiv. See Clewlow (2007), 202, who refers to John Venn to John Archibald Venn, 29 January 1916, GCA, Venn Papers, C2/7.

31. Venn and Venn (1887), xxiv.

32. John Venn to John Archibald Venn, 14 June 1921, GCA, Venn Papers, C2/31.

33. J. N. Keynes (1923), 128.

34. “A College Biographer’s Nightmare” in Venn (1913), 2–4.

35. W. H. S. O’Neill to John Venn, 9 May 1911, GCA, Venn Papers, C87/9.

36. The facsimiles appeared in 1974–78 and 2001, respectively. An ongoing project at Cambridge is integrating Alumni Cantabrigienses with Emden’s material, registers of women’s colleges (members of Girton and Newnham College not being given full university membership until 1947) and other sources—into an online searchable database. See https://venn.lib.cam.ac.uk/Documents/acad/enter.html.

37. Venn (1896a), 150.

38. Venn talked of “batches of statistics” both in his correspondence and in collaboration with Galton and with his son, Archibald. See, for example, John Venn to Francis Galton, 4 August 1889, UCL FG, F42; and John Venn to John Archibald Venn, 27 June 1920, GCA, Venn Papers, C2/29.

39. Venn (1897), xi, xii. See Cressy (1970) for a corrective to Venn’s inferences about the social composition of Caius College.

40. Venn and Galton (1890), 451; Venn (1897), xxi.

41. Venn and Venn (1887), xv.

42. Venn and Venn (1887), xiii, xii.

43. See J. A. Venn (1908).

44. See Annan (1984), 83–86. Venn’s contributions to the DNB included (in alphabetical order) George Boole, Edmund Gonville, Thomas Gooch, John Gostlin (older), John Gostlin (younger), Henry Venn of CMS, Henry Venn of Huddersfield, John Venn (regicide), and Richard Venn of St. Antholin’s.

45. L. Stephen (1895), 481.

46. L. Stephen (1889), 2–3; Venn (1896b), 36, 37. See, for example, E. S. Schaffer (2002) on Victorian biography. On Stephen’s idea of biographical writing for the Dictionary of National Biography, see, for example, Novarr (2000), chapter 1.

47. Venn (1895b), 190.

48. Albert Venn Dicey to John Venn, 24 January 1912, GCA, Venn Papers, C25/12.

49. A. S. Lea to John Venn, 5 May 1899, GCA, Venn Papers, C50/2. For his service to the college, Venn was also paid the compliment of placing his coat of arms in a window of the hall that contains those of the “Benefactors.”

50. Clewlow (2007), Stockton (1980), and Tolley (1997) all place Venn’s historical labors in the context of his family tradition.

51. Venn (1904b), 32.

52. Venn (1904c), v. John Caius’s statutes for Caius College required that Annals, which he had himself begun, would be continued. William Moore was appointed to help with this work in 1655; Annals for the years 1603–48 were entirely his work.

53. John Venn to Henry J. Hunter, 21 March 1900, CMS Venn, C42.

54. See Venn (1904a), vii; and John Venn to Laura Forster, 25 December 1906, SGL Venn.

55. See John Venn to Henry J. Hunter, 14 August 1901, CMS Venn, C42.

56. Venn, “Annals,” 1.

57. Venn (1904a), 112.

58. See Venn and Venn (1880), 30.

59. See H. Venn (of CMS) (1834). The CMS archives also contain a volume labeled “Notes (for intended work) on Early Evangelicals by Henry Venn of C.M.S.” CMS Venn, F53.

60. John Venn of Hereford to Charles Clayton, 29 January 1873, CMS Venn, 37.

61. Knight (1880), v.

62. Knight (1880), vi.

63. Stockton characterized Venn’s loss of the Evangelical perspective of the previous generations of Venns as the loss of a double perspective; see Stockton (1980). See also, for example, Peterson (1985) for a broader analysis of English spiritual autobiographical writing.

64. See Susanna C. Venn, “Notes from the years 1844 to 1867 from my birth to my marriage,” CMS Venn, F30.

65. John Venn to Henry J. Hunter, 19 August 1900, CMS Venn, C42.

66. John Venn to Laura Forster, 9 December 1902, SGL Venn.

67. Henry Venn of Walmer to John Venn, 9 November 1906, GCA, Venn Papers, C11/4. The plaque to the Venns at St. Michael’s Church, Otterton, was installed in 1905.

68. Henry Venn of Walmer to John Venn, 10 October 1906, GCA, Venn Papers, C11/3.

69. Henry Venn of Walmer to John Venn, 10 October 1906, GCA, Venn Papers, C11/3, Henry Venn of Walmer to John Venn, 9 November 1906, GCA, Venn Papers, C11/4.

70. Knight (1880), 549; Venn (1904a), vii.

71. Venn (1904a), 157, 165. See also Venn (1904a), 62.

72. Venn’s brother Henry Venn, ordained deacon in 1867 and priest in 1868, was vicar of Walmer between 1893 and 1908, having worked as rector of Tiverton between 1870 and 1885. His son Arthur Dennis Venn (1880–1945), ordained deacon in 1906 and priest in 1909, was the vicar of Chislet, Kent, from 1902 to 1945. See J. A. Venn (1954), 283.

73. Venn (1904a), 74.

74. Venn (1904a), 145.

75. Venn (1904a), 145, 111. See Francis Galton to John Venn, 29 August 1903, GCA, Venn Papers, C32/3; and John Venn to Laura Forster, 25 December 1916, SGL Venn.

76. Laura Forster to John Venn, 14 February 1907, GCA, Venn Papers, C29/1.

77. John Venn to Laura Forster, 15 February 1903, SGL Venn.

78. John Venn to Laura Forster, 3 June 1906, SGL Venn.

79. Henry Venn of Walmer to John Venn, 6 June 1910, GCA, Venn Papers, C11/10.

80. John Venn to Laura Forster, 7 January 1907, SGL Venn; John Venn to Laura M. Forster, 3 June 1906, SGL Venn.

81. See Clewlow (2007), 223–28, for this connection.

82. Venn (1899), 105.

83. Venn (1904b), 32.

84. Venn (1895b), 190, 198.

85. Venn (1895c), 92.

86. Editorial note, Caian 4, no. 3 (Michaelmas term 1894), 127.

87. De Soyres (1898), 130–31.

88. Venn (1901b), 236–37.

89. See Brooke (1993), 143.

90. Venn later took much pride in the fact that he had a hand in electing Seeley to a professorial fellowship of Caius in 1882. See John Venn to Laura Forster, 25 December 1902, SGL Venn.

91. See Clewlow (2007), 167; Garland (1980), 134. See also M. J. D. Roberts (2004) for a more general account of moral reform in Britain.

92. Clewlow (2007), 167, who reproduces a story told to the college historian Christopher Brooke by Sir Vincent Wigglesworth, the undergraduate in question.

93. Gesta 1893–1900, 15 June 1894, 16 May 1895, GCA, GOV/03/01/14.

94. See John Venn to Henry J. Hunter, 4 December 1894, CMS Venn, C42.

95. See Venn (1895b) and Venn (1904b). See also Clewlow (2007), 168n71.

96. See Gesta 1874–85, 14 October 1879, GOV/03/01/12, GCA; and Caian 12, no. 2 (Lent term 1903), 98.

97. See Gesta 1893–1900, 9 October 1894, GOV/03/01/14, GCA, E. S. Roberts, College Annals (1891–1903), 9 October 1894, GCA.

98. Venn (1904b), 31–32.

99. The junior fellow in question was Charles Mackenzie, who graduated second wrangler in 1848 and was established as the first missionary bishop in Nyasaland (now Malawi). Mackenzie died of blackwater fever by the Zambesi in January 1862.

100. This too reflected part of a broader trend. The university would establish a settlement at Camberwell and six other colleges already had a missionary presence in south London. When in 1897 Trinity allowed its house in Camberwell Road to be renamed “Cambridge House” it was a lay settlement with a clerical head but open to all Cambridge men. See Scotland (2007), chapter 6.

101. See Amos and Hough (1904), 97–106.

102. See Brooke (1985), 254–56. Currently, there are around forty-five clubs and societies to choose from at Caius.

103. Brooke (1985), 256. See Searby (1986), chapters 18–19, for a broader perspective on games and leisure for “town and gown” in Cambridge.

104. Wilkinson (1980), 80. Between 1891 and 1908, some thirty contributions coming from Venn appeared in the Caian, ranging from reproduced letters to historical accounts and addresses in the college chapel.

105. Venn (1891c), 36.

106. Brooke (1985), 225.

107. Brooke (1985), 226.

108. Anonymous (1903), 89.

109. Ferrers quoted in Winstanley (1947), 358. As Venn wrote in his Biographical History, Chapman regarded the inquiry of the first Royal Commission as “little short of sacrilegious,” and Guest was “on all questions, almost, theological, political, and academical, . . . a strong and consistent conservative” (Venn [1901a], 139, 144).

110. Venn (1901a), 144. See also John Venn to Henry Sidgwick, 13 June 1900, TCL, Sidgwick Papers, Add.Ms.c.95/175.

Epilogue

1. In the years 1888–89, the Venns spent a few months in Bournemouth, living at Fern Mount Hotel, Suffolk Road, before temporarily settling in the “Durrant Villa” on Avenue Road from January until November. See John Venn to Francis Galton, 16 February 1888, 10 January 1889, UCL FG, 3/3/21/2, F17–19, and F29–F32.

2. John Venn to his brother Henry Venn of Walmer, 2 February 1903, SGL Venn.

3. See John Venn to Henry Venn of Walmer, 12 February 1903, 17 February 1903, SGL Venn; and E. S. Roberts to John Venn, 18 February 1903, GCA, Venn Papers, C65. As Brooke explains: “In theory, the President’s tenure under the statutes of 1860 lapsed at the Master’s death or resignation, and when election by the General Meeting of fellows was introduced in 1904 the sitting President, John Venn, was not subject to reelection until the Master’s death in 1912. In practice, he was reelected until his death. The term from 1904 to 1920 was 3,5 years” (Brooke [1985], appendix 2).

4. John Venn to Henry Venn of Walmer, 12 February 1903, SGL Venn; John Venn to Laura Forster, 25 December 1906, SGL Venn.

5. John Venn to Laura Forster, 14 December 1902, SGL Venn. See Cambridge Independent Press, 12 June 1884, 20 August 1887, 13 February 1886.

6. John Venn to Laura Forster, 14 December 1902, SGL Venn. See Cambridge Independent Press, 29 October 1909, 16 October 1908. Florence Ada Keynes, wife of J. N. Keynes, would become the first women elected to the Cambridge town council (today Cambridge city council), in 1914, and the second women to become mayor of Cambridge, in 1932–33.

7. John Venn to Laura Forster, 1 October 1906, SGL Venn.

8. Francis (1923), 122; Venn, “Annals,” 139. See Day (2004) for John and Henry Venn’s visit to Zermatt in 1865 and their meeting with Lord Francis Douglas.

9. John Venn to Laura Forster, 1 October 1906, SGL Venn.

10. John Venn to Laura Forster, 3 June 1906, SGL Venn.

11. See John Venn to Laura Forster, 27 January 1903, SGL Venn. As Venn here wrote about James’s Varieties: “I have been much interested in it, & am reading it now for the second time. I never came on a book which covered the same ground. It is a very acute & sympathetic account of the [religious experience]—so far as the human mind is concerned, of all the various creeds. It is difficult to say which of them all he supports himself: he really almost seems as if he would like to believe them all.”

12. John Venn to Laura Forster, 15 February 1903, SGL Venn.

13. John Venn to Laura Forster, 15 February 1903, SGL Venn.

14. Leslie Stephen to John Venn, 30 October 1900, GCA, Venn Papers, C12/3.

15. John Venn to Laura Forster, 26 January 1908, SGL Venn.

16. John Venn to Laura Forster, 30 March 1917, 2 June 1903, SGL Venn.

17. Albert Venn Dicey to Henry Venn of Walmer, 13 June 1900, SGL Venn. See also Caroline Stephen to Louisa Venn, 7 June 1900, SGL Venn; and Albert Venn Dicey to cousin [probably C. E. Stephen], 6 June 1900, SGL Venn, Albert Venn Dicey to Henry Venn of Walmer, 13 June 1900, SGL Venn.

18. “S. C. Venn’s commonplace book,” 2 April 1909, SGL Venn.

19. See Susanna Venn to John Venn, 1 May 1901, GCA, Venn Papers, C6/3; Susanna Venn to John Archibald Venn, 16 October 1915, GCA, Venn Papers, C7/5.

20. Leslie Stephen to John Venn, 2 September 1902, GCA, Venn Papers, C12/4.

21. For example, in a letter of 15 October 1889, to Galton, Venn encouraged Galton to contact Horace Darwin for Cambridge matters related to their anthropometrical research in case he himself might be in Eastbourne or Bournemouth. Other references to the Darwins occurred, for example, in a letter from Susanna Venn to her son. See Susanna Venn to John Archibald Venn, 28 May 1916, GCA, Venn Papers, C7/25c.

22. See, for example, John Venn to Albert Venn Dicey, [n.d.] October 1885, GUL Dicey, Ms.Gen.508/18; and John Venn to Albert Venn Dicey, 3 May 1914, GUL Dicey, Ms.Gen.508/22.

23. John Venn to Laura Forster, 8 May 1903, 9 December 1902, SGL Venn. See also John Venn to Laura Forster, 9 December 1902, 25 December 1905, SGL Venn.

24. John Venn to Laura Forster, 14 December 1902, SGL Venn. See also John Venn to Laura M. Forster, 25 December 1906, 24 December 1909, SGL Venn.

25. See Venn (1889d). A few years later, Venn also published a discussion note, “On Some Facts of Binocular Vision” (Venn [1888b]).

26. The Wanganui Chronicle, “Venn’s Bowling Machine,” 5 August 1909.

27. The Wanganui Chronicle, “Venn’s Bowling Machine,” 5 August 1909. See “Bowling machine,” US943494A, US Grant, priority date 20 May 1909, publication date 14 December 1909.

28. Leslie Stephen to John Venn, 30 October 1900, GCA, Venn Papers, C12/3.

29. John Venn to Laura Forster, 3 June 1906, SGL Venn. See also John Venn to Laura Forster, 23 August 1903, SGL Venn. At the same time, Venn had never been a radical university reformer, reminiscing about Henry Jackson in 1921 that “we were never very intimate, as his particular type of University Radicalism was not quite to my taste. I agreed with much in his earlier energies, but found myself disagreeing much more frequently in later days.” John Venn to Albert Venn Dicey, 28 September 1921, GUL Dicey, Ms.Gen.508.31.

30. For a history of Liberal Unionism, see Cawood (2012).

31. For Dicey’s constitutional and political views, see, for instance, Cosgrove (1980).

32. See, for example, John Venn to Albert Venn Dicey, 3 May 1914, GUL Dicey, Ms.Gen.508/22.

33. John Venn to Laura Forster, 18 August 1903, SGL Venn.

34. John Venn to Laura Forster, 18 August 1903, SGL Venn.

35. Susanna C. Venn to John Archibald Venn, 28 March 1916, GCA, Venn Papers, C7/21. See also Albert Venn Dicey to John Venn, 15 April 1916, GCA, Venn Papers, C25/25.

36. John Venn to Laura Forster, 24 December 1909, SGL Venn.

37. Albert Venn Dicey to John Venn, 23 September 1909, GCA, Venn Papers, C26/6.

38. Spectator, 9 March 1912, 376.

39. Weill (2003), 491.

40. Albert Venn Dicey to John Venn, 3 March 1914, GCA, Venn Papers, C25/14.

41. John Venn to Albert Venn Dicey, 3 May 1914, GUL Dicey, Ms.Gen.508/22. See also Albert Venn Dicey to John Venn, 3 March 1914, 7 March 1914, GCA, Venn Papers, C25/14, C25/15; John Venn to Albert Venn Dicey, 3 May 1914, GUL Dicey, Ms.Gen.508/22. The two million signers of the British Covenant declared “that the claim of the Government to carry the Home Rule Bill into law, without submitting it to the judgment of the nation, is contrary to the spirit of our Constitution. We do hereby solemnly declare that, if the Bill is so passed, we shall hold ourselves justified in taking or supporting any action that may be effective to prevent the armed forces of the Crown being used to deprive the people of Ulster of their rights as Citizens of the United Kingdom” (see Powell [2004], chapter 2).

42. Albert Venn Dicey to John Venn, 16 April 1914, GCA, Venn Papers, C25/16. See also Albert Venn Dicey to John Venn, 30 April 1914, GCA, Venn Papers, C25/17.

43. All soldiers of the Territorial Force who had not taken the Imperial Service obligation (which waived the immunity from overseas service) or who were medically unfit for foreign service were placed in Provisional Battalions for home service. Officers and men were sent from 2/1st Cambridgeshire Regiment and 2/4th Northamptonshire Regiment to form the 62nd Provisional Battalion at Sheringham, Norfolk. See Riddell and Clayton (1934), appendix.

44. See Brooke (1993), chapter 10.

45. See Susanna C. Venn to John Archibald Venn, 25 September 1914, 28 March 1916, GCA, Venn Papers, C7/3, C7/21; John Venn to John Archibald Venn, 5 November 1915, GCA, Venn Papers, C2/4.

46. John Venn to Laura Forster, 25 December 1916, SGL Venn; Susanna C. Venn to John Archibald Venn, 4 April 1916, GCA, Venn Papers, C7/22.

47. John Venn to John Archibald Venn, 10 November 1915, GCA, Venn Papers, C2/5. When invalided out of the military service in 1916, John Archibald Venn served as a statistician in the Food Production Department.

48. John Venn to Laura Forster, 25 December 1916, 23 December 1917, SGL Venn.

49. John Venn to H. T. Francis, 23 September 1915, GCA, Venn Papers, C5/5.

50. John Venn to Albert Venn Dicey, 28 September 1921, GUL Dicey, Ms.Gen.508/31.

51. John Venn to Laura Forster, 18 August 1903, 19 May 1918, SGL Venn.

52. John Venn to Albert Venn Dicey, 28 February 1917, GUL Dicey, Ms.Gen.508/24.

53. Albert Venn Dicey to John Venn, 15 April 1916, GCA, Venn Papers, C25/25.

54. John Venn to Albert Venn Dicey, 28 September 1921, GUL Dicey, Ms.Gen.508/31.

55. John Venn to H. T. Francis, 23 September 1915, GCA, Venn Papers, C5/5.

56. John Venn to H. T. Francis, 23 September 1915, GCA, Venn Papers, C5/5.

57. See John Venn to Laura Forster, 30 March 1917, 25 December 1906, SGL Venn.

58. John Venn to Laura Forster, 30 March 1917, SGL Venn.

59. John Venn to Laura Forster, 25 December 1905, SGL Venn.

60. Venn (1913), 276; John Venn to Laura Forster, 25 December 1905, SGL Venn; John Venn to Laura Forster, 1 October 1906, SGL Venn.

61. John Venn to H. T. Francis, 23 September 1915, GCA, Venn Papers, C5/5.

62. Venn (1913), 254, John Venn to Laura Forster, 30 May 1903, SGL Venn.

63. John Venn to Laura Forster, 7 January 1907, SGL Venn.

64. John Venn to Albert Venn Dicey, 20 January 1919, GUL Dicey, Ms.Gen.508/25.

65. John Venn to Albert Venn Dicey, 20 January 1919, GUL Dicey, Ms.Gen.508.25.

66. Francis (1923), 100, 124. “What restraint or limit should there be to grief for one so dear?” (Horace, Ad Virgilium, de Morte Quinctilii Vari, Odes, Bk. 1, Ode 24:1).

67. See Francis (1923); Anonymous (1923); “W. B. H.” (1923). Venn’s last will is found in the Venn Collection in the Society of Genealogists Archive in London.

68. John Venn to Albert Venn Dicey, 15 April 1919, GUL Dicey, Ms.Gen.508/27. See also John Venn to H. T. Francis, 10 September 1918, GCA, Venn Papers, C5/2; and John Venn to Laura M. Forster, 23 December 1917, SGL Venn.

69. Francis (1923), 103.

70. Anonymous (1931).

71. “Book proposal, John Archibald Venn,” CMS Venn, F52.

72. The Annals are reproduced in full, and with annotations, in Verburgt (2021).

Bibliography

Books and Articles by John Venn

The following list includes each of the works written or edited by Venn to which direct reference is made in this book, as well as those works that have been consulted but not cited. (These latter works appear between square brackets.) It does not provide a full biography of Venn’s religious works, as most of these were unsigned articles for the Christian Observer, of which only some can be identified through references in letters between Venn and his father. The lists of Venn’s logical and historical works are thought to be complete.

Religious Works

Venn, J. [Anon.]. (1865). The theology of the nineteenth century. Christian Observer, May, 371–87.

[Venn, J. [Anon.]. (1869). Alleged Evangelical ritualistic irregularities. Christian Observer, March, 161–70.]

Venn, J. [Anon.]. (1870a). Dr Newman’s Grammar of Assent. Christian Observer, October, 727–35.

Venn, J. (1870b). On Some of the Characteristics of Belief Scientific and Religious: Being the Hulsean Lectures for 1869. London: Macmillan.

Venn, J. [Anon.]. (1871). Bishop Butler reviewed in the light of modern thought. Christian Observer, September, 681–92.

Logical, Philosophical, Statistical, and Miscellaneous Scientific Works

Venn, J. (1862). Science of history. Fraser’s Magazine, May 1862, 651–60.

Venn, J. (1866). The Logic of Chance: An Essay on the Foundation and Province of the Theory of Probability, with Especial Reference to Its Application to Moral and Social Science. London: Macmillan.

Venn, J. (1874). Review of The Principles of Science: A Treatise on Logic and Scientific Methods, by W. Stanley Jevons. Academy, 3 October, 381–84.

Venn, J. (1876a). The Logic of Chance: An Essay on the Foundations and Province of the Theory of Probability, with Especial Reference to Its Logical Bearings and Its Application to Moral and Social Science. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan.

Venn, J. (1876b). Consistency and real inference. Mind, 1 (1), 43–52.

Venn, J. (1876c). Boole’s logical system. Mind, 1 (4), 479–91.

Venn, J. (1878a). The foundations of chance. Princeton Review, 54, 471–510.

Venn, J. (1878b). The use of hypotheses. Mind, 3 (9), 43–56.

Venn, J. (1878c). Review of On the Theory of Logic: An Essay, by Carveth Read. Mind, 3 (12), 539–45.

Venn, J. (1879a). The difficulties of material logic. Mind, 4 (13), 35–47.

Venn, J. (1879b). Review of Logik, by Christoph Sigwart. Mind, 4 (15), 426–31.

Venn, J. (1879c). Review of Principles of the Algebra of Logic, by Alexander Macfarlane. Mind, 4 (16), 580–82.

Venn, J. (1880a). Symbolic logic. Princeton Review, 2, 247–67.

Venn, J. (1880b). On the forms of logical proposition. Mind, 5 (19), 336–49.

Venn, J. (1880c). On the diagrammatic and mechanical representation of propositions and reasonings. London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, 5, 1–18.

Venn, J. (1880d). On the various notations adopted for expressing the common propositions of logic. Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 4, 36–47.

Venn, J. (1880e). On the employment of geometrical diagrams for the sensible representation of logical propositions. Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 4, 47–59.

Venn, J. (1880f). Review of Begriffschrift, by Gottlob Frege. Mind, 5 (18), 297.

Venn, J. (1881a). Symbolic Logic. London: Macmillan.

Venn, J. (1881b). Symbolical logic. Nature, 24 (607), 140–41; 24 (608), 284–85.

[Venn, J. (1881). Our control of space and time. Mind, 6 (21), 18–31.]

Venn, J. (1881c). Note on “Sur un nouvel algorithme logique.” Mind, 6 (23), 447–48.

Venn, J. (1881d). Review of Hermann Scheffler’s Die Theorie der Erkenntnis oder die Logischen Gesetze. Mind, 6 (24), 592–95.

Venn, J. (1883). Review of Studies in Logic, by C. S. Peirce. Mind, 8 (32), 594–603.

Venn, J. (1884a). Reply to O. H. Mitchell. Mind, 9 (34), 321–22.

Venn, J. (1884b). Review of Studies and Exercises in Formal Logic, Including a Generalisation of Logical Processes in Their Application to Complex Inferences, by J. N. Keynes. Mind, 9 (34), 301–4.

Venn, J. (1884c). Review of Fallacies: A View of Logic from the Practical Side, by Alfred Sidgwick. Mind, 9 (34), 296–300.

Venn, J. (1884d). Review of Logik, by Wilhelm Wundt. Mind, 9 (35), 451–63.

Venn, J. (1887a). The game of logic. Nature, 36 (916), 53–54.

Venn, J. (1887b). The law of error. Nature, 36 (931), 411–12.

Venn, J. (1888a). The Logic of Chance: An Essay on the Foundations and Province of the Theory of Probability, with Especial Reference to Its Logical Bearings and Its Application to Moral and Social Science, and to Statistics. 3rd ed. London: Macmillan.

[Venn, J. (1888). Impersonal propositions. Mind, 13 (51), 413–15.]

Venn, J. (1888b). On some facts of binocular vision. Mind, 14 (54), 251–60.

Venn, J. (1889a). The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic. London: Macmillan.

Venn, J. (1889b). Cambridge anthropometry. Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 18, 140–54.

Venn, J. (1889c). Review of Natural Inheritance, by Francis Galton. Mind, 14 (55), 414–20.

Venn, J. (1889d). The mechanics of machinery. Nature, 37 (961), 510–11.

Venn, J., Galton, F. (1890). Cambridge anthropometry. Nature, 41 (1063), 450–54.

Venn, J. (1891a). On the nature and uses of averages. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 54 (3), 429–56.

[Venn, J. (1892). Results of anthropometry at Cambridge. In C. E. Shelly (ed.), Transactions of the Seventh International Congress of Hygiene and Demography, London, August 10th–17th, 1891. Vol. 9, sec. 9, State Hygiene. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 308–14.]

Venn, J. (1893). Correlation of mental and physical powers. The Monist, 4 (1), 5–19.

Venn, J. (1894). Symbolic Logic. 2nd ed. Revised and rewritten. London: Macmillan.

Venn, J. (1907). The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan.

Venn, J. (1962). The Logic of Chance. 4th ed. (rpt. of the 3rd ed.). New York: Chelsea.

Historical and Biographical Works

Venn, J., Venn, H. (1880). Memoir of Henry Venn. In W. Knight, The Missionary Secretariat of Henry Venn, B.D. London: Longmans, Green, 1–64.

Venn, J. (1886). Boole, George. In Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 5. London: Smith and Elder, 369–70.

Venn, J., Venn, S. C., eds. (1887). Admissions to Gonville and Caius College in the University of Cambridge, March 1559–60 to Jan. 1878–9. London: C. J. Clay and Sons.

[Venn, J. (1890). Gonville, Edmund. In Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 22, 106–7.]

[Venn, J. (1890). Gooch, Sir Thomas (1674–1754). In Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 22, 109–110.]

[Venn, J. (1890). Gostlin, John (1565/6–1626). In Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 22, 265.]

[Venn, J. (1890). Gostlin, John (1632–1704). In Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 22, 265.]

Venn, J., Venn, S. C. (1890). The Perse School: Notes from 1619 to 1864 from the Admission Registers of Gonville and Caius College and Other Sources. Printed for private circulation.

Venn, J. (ed.). (1891b). The Register of Baptisms, Marriages and Burials in St. Michael’s Parish, Cambridge (1538–1837). Cambridge: Cambridge Antiquarian Society.

Venn, J. (1891c). A chapter in college history (Address given in the Large Lecture Room). Caian, 1 (1), 13–39.

[Venn, J. (1892). An Elizabethan episode in English history. Caian, 1 (3), 169–84.]

[Venn, J. (1892). Adam Elliott’s experience. Caian, 2 (2), 86–98.]

[Venn, J. (1893). Monks in college. Caian, 3 (1), 25–34.]

[Venn, J. (1893). Dr Gostlin, master 1619–1626. Caian, 3 (2), 86–92.]

[Venn, J. (1894). College registers from 1349–1506. Caian, 4 (2), 109–16.]

Venn, J. (1895a). Some personal reminiscences of J. R. Seeley. Caian, 4 (3), 164–70.

[Venn, J. (1895). College registers from 1508–1550 (continued). Caian, 4 (3), 170–82.]

Venn, J. (1895b). Address delivered in the College Chapel, after the commemoration service, Dec. 21, 1894. Caian, 4 (3), 188–98.

[Venn, J. (1895). Three letters to Dr Caius (from the originals in our treasury). Caian, 5 (2), 87–91.]

Venn, J. (1895c). Academic “sports”: 1. A turbulent country gentleman. Caian, 5 (2), 92–96.

[Venn, J. (1895). Academic “sports”: 2. A seminarist martyr. Caian, 5 (3), 152–55.]

Venn, J. (1896a). Notice. Caian, 5 (3), 149–50.

[Venn, J. (1896). Dr Caius and Abp Parker. Caian, 6 (1), 15–17.]

[Venn, J. (1896). Academic sports: 3. An astrological fellow. Caian, 6 (1), 28–36.]

Venn, J. (1896b). College biographical history. Caian, 6 (1), 36–41.

[Venn, J. (1896). College biographical history (J. Venn). Caian, 6 (2), 97–113.]

[Venn, J. (1896). Academic “sports”: 4. A bishop’s black sheep. Caian, 6 (2), 111–13.]

[Venn, J. (1896). A freshman’s letter (by William Girling). Caian, 6 (2), 129–31.]

[Venn, J. (1897). History of our lecturers and tutors. Caian, 6 (3), 187–200.]

Venn, J. (1897). Biographical History of Gonville and Caius College 1349–1897: Containing a List of All Known Members of the College from the Foundation to the Present Time, with Biographical Notes. Vol. 1, 1349–1713. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Venn, J. (1898). Biographical History of Gonville and Caius College 1349–1897: Containing a List of All Known Members of the College from the Foundation to the Present Time, with Biographical Notes. Vol. 2, 1713–1897. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Venn, J. (1899). Toast to the memory of the benefactors. Caian, 8 (2), 103–10.

[Venn, J. (1899). Note on the portraits of Caius. Caian, 8 (2), 263–66.]

[Venn, J. (1899). The chapel. Caian, 9 (1), 45–60.]

[Venn, J. (1899). Venn, Henry (1725–1797). In Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 58, 207–8.]

[Venn, J. (1899). Venn, Henry (1796–1873). In Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 58, 208–9.]

[Venn, J. (1899). Venn, John (1586–1650). In Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 58, 209–10.]

[Venn, J. (1899). Venn, Richard (1691–1740). In Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 58, 210.]

[Venn, J. (1900). The early undergraduate. The Caian, 10 (1), 22–33.]

Venn, J. (1901a). Biographical History of Gonville and Caius College. Vol. 3, Containing the Biographies of the Successive Masters, the History of the Various Endowments and Benefactors, and Transcripts of Many Early Deeds and Charters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Venn, J. (1901b). Caius College. London: F. E. Robinson.

Venn, J. (1901c). Caiani incogniti. Caian, 10 (2), 104–11.

[Venn, J. (1901). Biographical history of Gonville and Caius College. Caian, 11 (1), 24.]

[Venn, J. (1902). Letters of an eighteenth-century student. Caian, 11 (2), 61–70.]

[Venn, J. (1903). Norman Macleod Ferrers, D.D., F.R.S. master of the college, 1880–1903. Caian, 12 (2), 85–92.]

[Venn, J. (1903). An epidemic of fifty years ago. Caian, 13 (1), 16–18.]

Venn, J. (1904a). Annals of a Clerical Family: Being Some Account of the Family and Descendants of William Venn, Vicar of Otterton, Devon, 1600–1621. London: Macmillan.

Venn, J. (1904b). Address given by Dr Venn in the College Chapel, Sunday, Oct. 30, 1904. Caian, 14 (1), 25–32.

Venn, J. (ed.). (1904c). The Annals of Gonville and Caius College by John Caius. Cambridge: Cambridge Antiquarian Society Octavo Series XL.

Venn, J. (1905). College life and ways fifty years ago. The Caian, 14 (2), 108–23.

[Venn, J. (1905). The new combination-room. Caian, 15 (1), 16–34.]

[Venn, J. (1907). Academic sports: A buccaneering physician. The Caian, 16 (2), 32–42.]

[Venn, J. (1908). Heraldry of the college. The Caian, 17 (2), 90–106.]

Venn, J. (1908). C. H. Monro. Caian, 17 (3), 162–68.

[Venn, J. (1908). Heraldry of the college (continued). Caian, 17 (3), 181–93.]

[Venn, J. (1909). Heraldry of the college. Caian, 18 (2), 121–34.]

Venn, J. (ed.). (1910a). Grace Book Delta: Containing the Records of the University of Cambridge for the Years 1542–1589. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Venn, J. (1910b). John Caius: Master of Gonville and Caius College in the University of Cambridge 1559–1573; A Biographical Sketch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[Venn, J. (1911). Pre-Reformation college life (Being a paper read to the Caius Historical Society). Caian, 20 (2), 147–64.]

[Venn, J. (1911). Undergraduate letters of the 17th century. Caian, 20 (3), 256–74.]

[Venn, J. (1912). Undergraduate letters of the 17th century. Caian, 21 (2), 127–39.]

Venn, J. (1912). Memoir of John Caius. In E. S. Roberts (ed.), The Works of John Caius, M.D. Second Founder of Gonville and Caius College and Master of the College 1559–1573. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–78.

[Venn, J. (1913). Undergraduate letters of the 17th century. Caian, 22 (2), 91–101.]

[Venn, J. (1913). Ferrers, Norman MacLeod (1829–1903). Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 14. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 430–31.]

Venn, J. (1913). Early Collegiate Life. Cambridge: W. Heffer and Sons.

Venn, J., Venn, J. A. (1913). The Book of Matriculations and Degrees: A Catalogue of Those Who Have Been Matriculated or Been Admitted to Any Degree in the University of Cambridge from 1544 to 1659. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[Venn, J. (1920). William Cunningham, D.D., F.B.A. Caian, 28 (2), 111–12.]

[Venn, J. (1922). The early undergraduate (A paper read to the Science and Arts Society). Caian, 30 (2), 85–100.]

Venn, J., Venn, J. A. (1922a). Alumni Cantabrigienses: A Biographical List of All Known Students, Graduates and Holders of Office at the University of Cambridge, from the Earliest Times to 1900. Pt. 1, From the Earliest Times to 1751, vol. 1, Abbas–Cutts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Venn, J., Venn, J. A. (1922b). Alumni Cantabrigienses: A Biographical List of All Known Students, Graduates and Holders of Office at the University of Cambridge, from the Earliest Times to 1900. Pt. 1, From the Earliest Times to 1751, vol. 2, Dabbs–Juxton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[Venn, J. (1922). In memoriam: Arthur Ransome. Caian, 30 (3), 158–64.]

[Venn, J., Venn, J. A. (1924). Alumni Cantabrigienses: A Biographical List of All Known Students, Graduates and Holders of Office at the University of Cambridge, from the Earliest Times to 1900. Pt. 1, From the Earliest Times to 1751, vol. 3, Kaile–Ryves. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.]

[Venn, J., Venn, J. A. (1927). Alumni Cantabrigienses: A Biographical List of All Known Students, Graduates and Holders of Office at the University of Cambridge, from the Earliest Times to 1900. Pt. 1, From the Earliest Times to 1751, vol. 4, Saal-Zuinglius. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.]

Other Authors

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Index

Adamson, Robert, 199

Admissions to Gonville and Caius College in the University of Cambridge (Venn and Venn), 269, 271

Africa, 8, 33

agnosticism, 52, 147

Airy, George Biddell, 225, 319n75

Aldrich, Henry, 151

Alford, Henry, 51

Alumni Cantabrigienses (Venn and Venn), xv, xvii, 271–77, 302, 306, 360n36

Analogy of Religion (Butler), 102, 130–31

Ancient Law (Maine), 69

Anderson, Hugh Kerr, 293, 302

Annals of a Clerical Family (Venn), xxi, 2, 140, 209–10, 212, 269, 280, 282, 284–86, 291, 306

Annals of Gonville and Caius College, The (Caius), 271

Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 237–38

anthropometry, xvii, xxi, 224, 234, 236–37, 272, 279

Antiquarian Field Club, 274

Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Newman), 54, 148

archaeology, 359n4

Aristotle, 85, 102, 150–51, 155–56, 158, 163, 181, 185, 188, 200, 207, 221, 229, 253; Aristotelian logic, xix, 153, 159, 164, 168, 175–77

Ars Conjectandi (Bernoulli), 112

Ashton, John, 4

Ashton, Marie Anna Isabella Margaretta Beatrice, 4

Asquith, H. H., 301

astronomy, 72, 227–28

Athanasian Creed, 141

atheism, 44, 103, 133–34

Austen, Jane, 304, 344n35

Austen-Leigh, Augustus, 275

Austin, John, 56, 65, 69

Australia, 299

Babbage, Charles, 156, 162–63, 195

Babington, Henry, 34

Bacon, Francis, 52–53, 68, 85, 103, 150, 154–56, 159–63, 175–76, 248, 253, 261, 264

Bain, Alexander, 84, 89, 138, 149, 151, 161, 199, 214, 222, 334n62, 341n49; belief, definition of, 338n54

Baldwin, J. M., 345–46n72

Balfour, Arthur James, 85, 217

Barton, J., 65

Bath Natural History, 274

Battle of the Somme, 303

Baynes, Thomas Spencer, 151, 153–54, 165, 180

Beagle (vessel), 326n65

Beatrice, Queen Mary, 4

Begriffschrift (Frege), 205–8, 348n107

Belgium, 301–2

Bell, Vanessa, 8

Bendall, Cecil, 215, 350n29

Bengel, Johann, 51

Bentham, George, 153–54

Bentham, Jeremy, 56, 152–54

Berkeley, George, 358n104

Berkley, William, 23, 52–53, 67, 315–16n7

Bernoulli, Jacob, 102, 112–14, 229, 346n80, 358n105; objective probability, 333n32

Bickersteth, Edward, 336n19

Biographical History of Gonville and Caius College (Venn), 271–74, 277–78, 280, 287, 291–92, 363n109

Biographical Register of the University of Cambridge to 1500 (Emden), 277

Birks, Thomas Rawson, 91, 130, 145, 218, 336n19, 338n80, 339n81

Blundell, Peter, 3

Blunt, Arthur, 64

Boerhaave, Herman, 4

Bolzano, Bernard, 188, 344n43

Boole, George, xix–xx, 98, 104–5, 111–12, 115, 149, 151, 154, 161, 163, 166, 169, 173, 176–83, 187–88, 194–95, 198–200, 202–8, 245–46, 263, 279, 342n94, 346n79, 346n80, 347n91, 348n102, 348n107; algebra of logic, 156–59, 162, 164, 167–68, 174, 197, 246; and calculus, 157; as conceptualist, 157, 184; extensional classes, part-whole analysis, 155; logical inference, 164; The Mathematical Analysis of Logic, 156, 186; six laws of thought, 157

Bosanquet, Bernard, 243, 263

Boston, James, 10, 23–24, 92

Bradley, Francis Herbert, 106–7, 120–21, 173, 243, 263

Braithwaite, R. B., 124, 262–63

Bridgewater Treatise (Babbage), 156

Britain, xvi, xxi, 8, 28, 43, 56, 70–71, 104–5, 108, 124, 150–52, 180, 198–99, 204, 208, 218, 303–4, 309; Continental mathematics, introduction of in, 103; pragmatism in, 265. See also England; Scotland; Wales

British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), 81

British Empire, 290, 300

British Expeditionary Force (BEF), 301–2

Broad, C. D., xvii, 102, 124, 243–44, 261–64, 358n105

Broad Churchmen, 4, 46, 54, 56–57, 59, 147. See also Liberal Anglicans

Bronté, Charlotte, 69

Browne, George Forrest, 271–72

Buckle, Thomas Henry, 57, 61, 65, 70–71, 73–74, 76–77, 98, 104–5, 108, 134, 257; as controversial figure, 72

Bulley, Amy, 96

Burgersdijk, Franco, 357n61

Bush, Robert Wheler, 22

Butler, Josiah, 52–53, 65, 101–2, 105, 130–32, 135–36, 322n35; natural theology, 134

Byron, Lord, 62–63

Caius, John, 271, 280, 287, 290, 292

Caius College, 30–33, 80–81, 87, 213–14, 244, 271, 274, 277–78, 280, 287, 289, 292, 302; Caian identity, search for, 288, 291; Caius House, 259; Caius Mission, 290; Evangelicalism, reputation for, 316n27; layman, 320n7, 320n11; marriage restrictions, removal of, 91–92, 328n34; Perse School, 359n9; as sheltered environment, 44. See also Cambridge University

Caius College (Venn), 288

Caius College Statutes, 316n13

calculus, 36, 39, 117, 157–58, 174, 178–79, 181, 183–84, 197, 204

calculus ratiocinator, 195, 198, 207, 346n74, 348n108

Calvinism, 57

Cambridge (England), 28–29, 125, 216, 264, 301–2

Cambridge (Massachusetts), 125, 264

Cambridge Anthropometric Laboratory, 134

Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 270–71, 274–75, 294

Cambridge Apostles, 79, 96–97

Cambridge Local Examinations, 94

Cambridge Philosophical Society, xvii, 237, 354n127

Cambridge school of analytic philosophy, xvii–xviii, 100, 124, 217, 243, 262

Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company, 237–38, 353–54n112

Cambridgeshire Horticultural Society, 294

Cambridge Statutes, 82, 217

Cambridge University, xv, 45, 77–78, 99, 100, 105, 208, 320n15, 354n113, 358n104; analytical revolution at, 217–18; as bastion of Anglican orthodoxy, 43; Board for Moral Sciences, 79, 84–85, 234–35, 353n99; Caius College, 28–29; Cambridge Anthropometric Laboratory, 222, 237, 240; Cavendish Physical Laboratory, 234; and Church of England, connection between, 43; Classical Tripos, 35, 38; curriculum of, 35; Evangelicals at, 30–33; experimental psychology at, 222, 234; Indian Civil Service, 80–81, 85, 187, 241, 355n1301; inductive logic, 358n105; Laboratory of Physiology, 234; layman, 320n7, 320n11, 363n100; Mathematical Tripos, 35, 38, 40–41, 43, 79, 105, 319n75; Moral Sciences and Natural Sciences Triposes, 38, 58–59, 177–78, 209; moral sciences at, 81–84, 93; Moral Sciences Club, 96–97; Moral Sciences Tripos, 79–81, 85, 124–25; physical science at, 234; and pragmatism, 264–65; probability theory, 105, 107; psychology at, 235; reform at, 81–82, 85, 93–94; secular academic culture at, 218; Senate House examination, 38–40; tripos examination, 103; women’s education, 87, 94–96; Wortley exhibition, 80

Cambridge University Act, 43, 82

Cambridge University Library, xvii, 209, 221; Venn Collection, 346n77

Campion, William M., 39

Carlyle, Thomas, 54

Carnap, Rudolf, 163, 358n105

Carroll, Lewis (Charles L. Dodgson), xv, 150–51, 199, 217, 345n58, 347n94; diagrams of, 194

Carus, William, 28

Case, Thomas, 222

Castillon, Frédéric-Adolphe-Maximilien-Gustave Salvemini de, 347n97

Cattell, James McKeen, 222, 236–37, 240, 353n106

Causton, T. L. N., 65

Cayley, Arthur, 36, 95, 202–3

Chamberlain, Joseph, 300

Chapman, Benedict, 292

Charity Organizations Society, 294

China, 31

Cholmondeley, Roger, 21

Cholmondeley’s School, 21, 23

Christianity, 11–12, 26–27, 52–53, 57, 67–68, 139, 144, 213, 295, 298, 304–5

Christian Observer (magazine), xvi, xx, 8, 32, 59, 80, 125, 130–33, 145, 147, 335n6, 336n20

Christian Vernacular Society, 127, 128

Chrystal, George, 334–35n65

Churchill, Winston, 300–301

Church Missionary Society (CMS), 1, 6, 8, 10, 15, 17–18, 20, 25, 33, 44, 127–28, 212, 335n6

Church of England, 3, 14, 43–44, 56–59, 79, 89, 138, 147, 218; Evangelical movement, 7; Evangelical wing, xvi, 9, 311n26; Thirty-Nine Articles, 100

Clapham Sect, xvi–xvii, 5, 8, 12, 14, 17, 24–25, 213, 296, 299–300, 304, 335–36n10

Clark, John Willis, 272–73, 275

Clayton, Charles, 28–29, 31, 33, 46, 126, 210, 213, 283, 289, 315n4, 316n12, 316n27, 317n32, 320n15

Clerical Disabilities Act, 148, 209–10, 212–13

Clerical Subscription Act, 147

Clifford, W. K., 97, 332n104

Clifton Antiquarian Club, 274

Clothing Society, 10

Clough, Anne, 94–95

Colenso, John, 129, 314n122

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 51–54, 67–68, 139, 338n60

Comforts of the Poor, 8

Complete Duty of Man, The (H. Venn of Huddersfield), xvi, 1, 11–13, 15–16, 31, 62, 311n42, 312n63

Comte, August, 65, 98, 105, 338n62

conceptualism, 166–67, 180, 184–85

Condorcet, Marquis de, 135

“Consistency and Real Inference” (Venn), 165

constructivism, 248

conventionalism, xvii, 162, 171, 243–44

Coombe, Charles George, 23

counterfactuals, 106, 110

Cowell, Edward Byles, 215, 350n29

Crakanthorpe, Richard, 356n35

Cunningham, J. W., 132

Cunningham, William, 145–46, 220–21, 270

Darwin, Charles, xvi, 43, 53, 55, 99, 261, 326n65, 333n18; theory of evolution, 109

Darwin, Francis “Frank,” 298

Darwin, George, 99, 333n18

Darwin, Horace, 237–38, 298, 364n21

Darwin, Maud, 294

Daudet, Alphonse, 69

Davies, Emily, 94–95

de Butts, Isabel L., 349n13

deduction, 179

deductive logic, xix, 150, 152, 154–55, 175–76, 179–80, 245; Aristotelian realm, 156

deductive reasoning, 152–53, 159–60, 179, 182

De Morgan, Augustus, xix, 37, 98, 103–6, 111, 115, 118, 134, 149–50, 153, 155–56, 158–59, 161–63, 166, 174, 180, 195, 197, 203–5, 225, 245–46, 339–40n8, 341n52, 344n41; Whewell debate, 254–55

de Quincey, Thomas, 68

de Soyres, J., 288

determinism, 61, 105, 134; historical, 98, 105; statistical, 333n17

Dewey, John, xx, 243, 247–48, 251, 259, 263, 265

diagrams. See Euler diagrams; Marquand diagrams; Venn diagrams

Dicey, Albert Venn, xvi, 53, 69, 210, 213, 215, 221–22, 284, 296, 298–301, 303, 351n62

Dickens, Charles, 69

Dictionary of National Biography (Stephen), 279

domestic biography, 4, 280, 282, 286–87

Donne, John, 9

Douglas, Susanna Mary, 91–92

Drury, Benjamin, 290

Dyne, John Bradley, 21

Early Collegiate Life (Venn), 276, 280, 283, 291

Ecce Homo (Seeley), 53–54

Edgeworth, Francis Y., 120–22, 229–32, 250, 352n91, 352n92; Pearson controversy, and erasure of, 352n93

Edmonstone, Charles Welland, 91–92

Edwards, A. W. F., 344–45n49

Elements of Logic (Whately), xix, 151–52, 154–56, 339n1

Eliot, George, 69

Elizabeth I, 79

Elland Clerical Society, 6, 9

Ellicott, Charles, 51

Elliott, Henry Venn, 8

Ellis, Robert Leslie, 98, 102, 111–12, 198, 346n79

empiricism, xx, 52, 97, 244, 246, 262, 265, 355n7

Engel, A. J., 327n1

England, 2, 4, 9, 21, 66–67, 101, 165, 198, 224, 264, 299; Lake District, 68, 294, 327n5; pragmatism in, 265; revival of logic in, 177. See also Britain

English Civil War, 2–3

Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, An (Hume), 337n40

Eranus Society, 99, 125, 332n104

Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (Newman), 131–32

Essay on Probabilities (De Morgan), 104

Essays and Reviews (Jowett and Pattison), xvi, 43, 52–53, 56–60, 69, 130, 147, 323n80

ethics, 89, 217–18, 220, 264–65, 303, 329–30n52

Euclid, 37, 39, 181

eugenics, 240

Euler, Leonard, 194, 339–40n8

Euler diagrams, 187–89, 191, 344n40, 344n43

Evangelicalism, xvi, 1, 6, 11–12, 15–16, 26–28, 31–33, 55, 58, 66, 93, 100, 125, 126, 130, 146, 148, 210–11, 213–14, 283–84, 286–87, 289–90, 298; as anti-intellectual movement, 336n16; Evangelical revival, 5, 7

Exploratio Philosophica (Grote), 97

extensionalism, 183

Faithfull, James, 47

Farish, William, 6–8

Fawcett, Henry, 94

Fawcett, Millicent, 94

Fechner, Theodor, 222, 353n199

Ferrers, Norman Macleod, 37, 68, 81, 213–14, 291–93, 295, 300, 316n27, 327n5

Ferrier, James Frederick, 97

Finch, Gerard Brown, 319n76

Fischer, Harold, 334n50

Fischer, Kuno, 170

Fisher, Ronald, 334n49

Fitzroy, Robert, 75, 326n65

Formal Logic (De Morgan), 156

Formal Logic (J. N. Keynes), 186, 203–4, 263

Forster, E. M., 298

Forster, Laura Mary, 273, 286, 298

Forster, W. E., 332n104

Foster, Joseph, 274

Foster, Michael, xvi, 234–36

Fowler, Thomas, 351n59

France, 8, 129, 301–2

Francis, H. T., 32, 302, 305, 324n12, 346n77

Freetown (Sierra Leone), 8

“Free Will and Science” (Maxwell), 99

Frege, Gottlob, xix–xx, 149–50, 155–57, 171, 173, 177, 181, 187, 197–99, 202–8, 348n105, 348n107, 348n108; Schröder, dispute between, 346n74

frequency theory of probability, 102, 264

frequentism, 102, 106, 110–11, 118, 121–24; and idealization, 113

Frost, Percival, 40

Froude, Anthony, 74

Galton, Francis, xv, xxi, 36, 120, 187, 196, 216, 229–32, 236, 237, 242, 244, 272, 277, 286, 344n35, 350n48, 352n91, 352n92, 352n93, 353n108, 353–54n112, 354n119, 354n123, 354–55n129, 364n21; Venn, collaboration with, 114, 134, 222, 238–41, 354n127

Game of Logic (Dodgson), 194

Garrick, James P., 34, 39, 62, 302, 317n38

Gauss, Carl Friedrich, 114

Gay, Patience (d. 1712), 3

Gedge, William Wilberforce, 34, 317n38

George V, 301

Gergonne, Joseph Diez, 344n40

Germany, 130, 150–51, 222, 234, 303

Gladstone, W. E., 217, 300

Glaisher, James W. L., 231, 352n86

Gonville, Edmund, 287

Goodwin, Harvey, 31

Gould, Joseph, 34, 317n38

Grassmann, Robert, 183, 202

Green, T. H., 262, 332n104

Gregory, Duncan F., 343n15

Grote, John, xvii, 79, 84, 86, 88, 96–99, 244, 263, 331n88, 331n99

Grote Club, xvii, 96–99, 105, 125, 331n88, 331n93, 331n99. See also Grote Society

Grote Society, xvii, 9, 331n916. See also Grote Club

Guest, Edwin, 30, 292, 315n4, 328n22

Gurney, Emelia Russell (née Batten), 19, 313n102

Hall, G. S., 235

Halsted, George Bruce, 150–51, 202–3

Hamilton, Bruce, 302

Hamilton, William, xix, 52, 149, 151–52, 154–55, 158, 161, 165, 181, 188, 248–49, 339–40n8, 340n9, 341n52; quantification of predicate, 153, 159, 180

Harley, Robert, 346n79

Harrison, Frederic, 56–57

Harvard University, 265

Harvey, William J., 275, 290

Hebrew Politics (Strachey), 52

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 97, 165, 247–48, 251, 262–63, 358n94

Herschel, John, xix, 103, 106, 149–50, 156, 159–60, 162–63, 178, 319n75

Hey, Samuel, 9, 28

History of Civilization in England (Buckle), 65, 70–71, 74, 77, 105

History of the Inductive Sciences (Whewell), 103, 160, 254

Hoole, Charles Holland, 314n127, 315–16n7

Hope, Mary (née Sykes), 49

Hopkins, William, 36–37, 317–18n50

Hort, F. J. A., 99, 218

Hughlings, I. P., 202–3

Hulse, John, Hulsean Lectures established by, 337n45

Hume, David, 358n104; miracle stories, criticism of, 134

Hunkin, J. W., 305

Hunter, Henry J., 272, 280, 282

Huntingdon, Lady, 24

Husserl, Edmund, 173

Huxley, Thomas Henry, xxi, 259, 327n9

idealism, xx, 161–62, 244, 248; British, 97–98, 247, 262; German, 262; philosophical, 243; rebellion against, 262

India, 31, 33

induction, 159, 161, 167–68, 173–74, 179, 245, 249, 253–54, 263; copula, reduction of, 163; experience and observation, 160; and hypotheses, 169; and inference, 163; as inverse of deduction, 162–63; logic, as center of, 160; major premise, 152; and probability, 242, 264; and reasoning, 176; and syllogism, 250, 255; as symbolic form, 162

inductive logic, xvii, xix, 77–78, 89, 107, 115, 150, 155–56, 159, 161, 175–76, 217–18, 243–44, 246, 253, 261, 358n105; De Morgan–Whewell exchange on, 254; induction by confirmation, 264; induction by elimination, 264; probability theory, 247

inductive reasoning, 103, 152, 153, 159, 163; major premise, 160

inference, 74, 154, 181–82, 186, 202, 204, 246, 250–51; deductive, 152, 155, 160; formal, 152; inductive, 115, 150, 152, 155, 160, 163, 176, 245, 253, 255, 263; informal, 131; logical, 155, 164; major premise, 166; material, 152; nonsyllogistic, 156; rules of, 157; scientific, 104; subjective, 252; syllogistic, 117, 155, 158; about things, 106, 110, 117; valid, 107, 109–10, 159

In Memoriam (Tennyson), 68, 108–9, 140

Institution for Promoting Useful and Religious Knowledge, 11

International Health Exhibition, Anthropometric Laboratory at, 237

Investigation of the Laws of Thought, An (Boole), 104, 156–58, 162, 174, 178–79, 198, 208

Ireland, Home Rule, 300–301, 365n41

Jackson, Henry, 99, 364–65n29

Jacobites, 4

James, William, 125, 133, 140–43, 216, 247, 264–65, 295, 364n11

James I, 80

James II, 4

James IV, 4

Jameson, Francis, 37

Jebb, Richard, 296

Jeffreys, Harold, 263–64

Jevons, William Stanley, xix–xx, 103–4, 106–7, 120, 150, 153–54, 157, 159, 163–64, 166, 168–69, 174, 176–77, 179–81, 183, 189, 198, 200, 202–3, 205–6, 214, 234–35, 244–48, 250, 254–55, 344n41, 347n94, 347n97, 348n102, 357n61; logical machine, 194–95, 197, 345n60; The Principles of Science, 162, 165, 242–43, 249

Johns Hopkins University, 235

Johnson, Frank, 276, 277

Johnson, W. E., xvii, 101–2, 120, 122, 124, 178, 193, 203–5, 207–8, 221, 244, 249–50, 261–62; Logic, 255, 263–64, 358n104

Jones, Richard, 156

Jourdain, Francis, 23

Jowett, Henry, 7

Jowett, Joseph, 7

Kant, Immanuel, 52, 97, 160–61, 172–73, 181, 199–200, 246, 251, 262, 329–30n52, 346n80

Kennedy, Alexander, 299

Kennedy, Benjamin H., 94–95

Kepler, Johannes, 159

Keynes, Florence Ada, 294, 363–64n6

Keynes, J. Neville, xvii, 89, 95–96, 101, 145–46, 177, 179, 186, 193, 203–5, 220–21, 261–64, 267, 276

Keynes, John Maynard, 95–96, 102–3, 106, 115, 120, 123–24, 163, 263, 334–35n65, 358n104; probability of proportions, 122

King, Joshua. 19

Knight, A. M., 351n53

Knight, Arthur, 289

Knight, Wallis, 283

Knight, William, 283

Knightbridge Professorship, xvii, 88, 145–46, 210, 218, 258

Ladd-Franklin, Christine, 202, 346n85, 347n94

Lamb, E. B., 11

Lamb, John, 126, 335n5

Lambert, Johann Heinrich, 198–200, 339–40n8, 346n80

Lange, Friedrich Albert, 344n40

Laplace, Pierre Simon, 104–6, 111–12, 114, 121, 134, 358n105; rule of succession, 334n50; urn of nature analogy, 118

Law, William, 5

Lectures on Logic (Hamilton), 153

Leibniz, G. W., 102, 185–86, 195, 198–200, 347n97; calculus ratiocinator, 346n74, 348n108; lingua characteristica universalis, 346n74, 348n108

Letters on Probability (Quetelet), 113

Levin, Thomas Woodhouse, 87, 220, 351n57

Lexis, William, 230, 232

Liberal Anglicans, xvi, 56, 73, 79, 146. See also Broad Churchmen

liberal education, 35, 45, 82, 327n9

Lightfoot, J. B., 99

Livingstone, David, 320n15, 362–63n99

Lloyd George, David, 300–301

Lock, J. B., 288–89

Locke, John, 52–53, 68, 97, 154, 358n104

logic, 150, 189, 202, 206, 210, 216, 222, 242, 251, 258, 261, 347n94; algebraic logic, 154–59, 161–62, 164, 166–68, 173–84, 186, 197–99, 204, 207, 217–18, 243, 246, 253, 348n111; Aristotelian, xix, 153, 159, 164, 168, 175–77; British, xix, 101, 149–52, 161, 165–66, 175–76, 348n105; conceptualist view of, 184–85; conceptualist v. materialist camps, 161–62, 165; deductive, 107; definition of, 166, 171, 248–49; as dualistic, 248, 252, 257; empirical, 170, 246–47, 250; formal, xix–xx, 149, 165–66, 172–73, 179, 243, 245–47, 269; Hegelian view of, 247–48; inferences, 115; law of duality, 164, 169; law of identity, 163–64; law of noncontradiction, 164; laws of inference about things, 106; laws of thought, 163–64; material view of, 105, 167, 169–73, 176, 245; mathematical, xix–xx, 157, 174, 181, 187, 204, 208, 263, 358n100; and mathematics, 164, 167, 180–81, 183–84, 197–98, 207; modern, 346n74; objective school, 248, 249; ontology, 185; predicate-quantificational, 156; and probability, 103, 105–6, 264; scientific, 243, 246; syllogistic, xix, 107–8, 115, 150, 152, 154–55, 158–59, 161, 166, 205, 207, 253; symbolic, 174–76, 199–200; as symbolic language, 181–82; traditional, 151, 164, 168, 174–77, 179–82, 185–86, 188, 198, 249. See also inductive logic

Logic (Johnson), 255, 263–64, 358n104

“Logical Calculus, The” (Johnson), 263

Logic of Chance, The (Venn), xx, xxii–xxiii, 62, 77–78, 88, 98–99, 101, 104, 114, 116, 124–25, 138–39, 149, 162, 166, 178, 210, 214, 222, 228–29, 231, 236, 242, 244, 250, 254, 261, 263, 266, 272, 329n38, 333n18, 334n64, 352n86, 357n70; first edition of, 226–27, 230; frequency theory of probability, 102–3, 110–11, 224; hypothetical frequentism, 121–22; inductive reasoning, 103; inference about things, 110, 117; inspiration of, 105; logic of probability, 115; metaphysics, dismissal of as, 106–7; praise of, 122; principle of indifference, 118; probability theory, 108, 333n35; proportional propositions, 108, 115, 117; reception of, 119–20; religious themes, discussion of, 133–36; series, different kinds of, 109–10, 112–13; syllogistic logic, 108; third edition of, 224; universal propositions, 108

Logik (Sigwart), 172–73, 243, 249, 254

Logik (Wundt), 243, 249

London (England), 216; Bloomsbury, 8

London Society for Promoting Christianity, 128

Lotze, Hermann, 234, 243

Louis XVIII, 20

Love and Duty (Tennyson), 54

Ludwig, Carl, 234

Lull, Ramon, 195

Lyttleton, Arthur, 220, 351n57

Macaulay, Thomas Babington, xvi, xxii

MacColl, Hugh, 150–51, 156, 159, 177, 181, 198–99, 202–3, 206, 347n94, 348n102, 348n105

Macfarlane, Alexander, 150–51, 173–74, 191, 194, 197–98, 202–3

Machin, John, 225

Mackenzie, Charles, 362–63n99

Maine, Henry, 57, 69

Maitland, Frederic W., 85, 99, 215–16, 220, 270, 275, 295

Malthus, Thomas, 85

Manley, Thomas, 50, 54, 58–60, 212

Mansel, Henry Longueville, xix, 51, 65, 151, 153, 165, 340n9; Bampton Lectures, 52

Markby, Thomas, 94–95

Marquand, Allan, logical machine, 196–97, 345–46n72

Marquand diagrams, 193–94, 345n70

Marsden, J. B., 336n20

Marsh, Catherine, 321n35

Marsh, William, 48, 321n35

Marsh, William Tilson, 48–49, 212, 321n35

Marshall, Alfred, xvii, 85, 87, 95–97, 100, 187, 220, 222, 244, 249, 328n26, 331n93, 344n35

Marshall, Mary Paley, 95, 331n79

Mary II, 4

Mathematical Analysis of Logic (Boole), 156, 186

Mathematical Tripos, 35, 38, 40–41, 43, 79, 105, 244, 319n75

Matriculations and Degrees (J. A. Venn), 272–73

Maurice, F. D., xvii, xx, 32, 52, 58, 79, 88–89, 94–95, 97, 129, 145–47, 212, 329n47, 336n13

Maxwell, James Clerk, 36, 99, 234

Mayor, John E. B., 84, 88, 91, 95–96, 99, 266–67

Mayor, Joseph, 84–85

McCosh, James, 51–52, 322n55

McTaggart, J. M. E., 97, 242–44, 262–63, 358n94

Methodism, 6

Meyers, W. H., 216

Mich, Josef, 191, 344–45n49

Mill, John Stuart, xv, xix–xx, 52, 55, 73–76, 83, 84–85, 89, 97–98, 101–2, 107, 111–12, 118, 120, 146, 149–51, 152, 154, 156, 161–63, 169–71, 173, 176, 178, 243, 247–53, 256, 264, 299, 326n60, 327n9, 329n49, 329–30n52, 338n60, 351n62, 358n104; empiricism of, 262; frequency view of probability, 106; frequentism of, 106; and induction, 167, 255; induction, and logic, 160, 167; induction and syllogism, 255; inductive logic of, 246; inference, as inductive, 155; influence of, 245; “laws of things,” 245; logic, material view of, 167, 245; petitio principii charge against syllogism, questioning of, 245; Principles of Political Economy, 61, 66–67; A System of Logic, xvi, 61, 66–68, 70–72, 77, 96, 103–6, 155, 159–60, 164–65, 177, 242, 244–45, 262, 358n98; theory of syllogism, 166; and Victorian thought, 56, 66–67; Whewell, debate with, 245, 254

Milner, Isaac, 8–9, 28

Mind (journal), xviii, 149, 165, 169–70, 214, 341n49, 350n47

Mitchell, O. H., 202, 346n84

Monro, Charles, 53, 62–65, 69, 181, 324n12

Moore, G. E., xvii, 98, 217–18, 244, 262–64

moral sciences, xvii, 82, 83, 91, 208, 220, 256, 328n30

Moral Sciences Tripos, 89, 207, 217–18, 244, 292, 328n24, 339n1; Anglophone philosophy, 84; Board of Moral Sciences, 84; in 1850s, 82–83; in 1860s, 82–84, 86–87; establishing of, 82; flourishing of, 82; logic and mental philosophy, 85; recommended works, 261; and reform, 83. See also Cambridge University

Moule, A. C., 305

Mozley, J. R., 97

Myers, C. S., 235

Napoleon, 64

natural theology, 103, 131, 134, 322n55

Nature (journal), xviii, 181, 193, 204, 206, 228–29, 232, 238, 250–51, 299, 333n18, 347n94, 350n47

Neale, C. M., 274

Neues Organon (Lambert), 200

Newman, John Henry, 54, 131–32, 148, 339n98

Newton, Isaac, 100, 103, 159, 187, 261

Novum Organum (Bacon), 346n79

Of a Liberal Education (Whewell), 82

On Liberty (Mill), 55–56, 66–67

On Some of the Characteristics of Belief, Scientific and Religious (Venn’s Hulsean Lectures), xx, xxii, 53, 102, 125, 133, 136–38, 140, 142–44, 146, 215, 243, 247, 253, 265

On the Origin of Species (Darwin), xvi, 43, 53, 55, 69

On the Theory of Logic (Read), 169–70

Ord, Charles Renshaw, 31, 33

Organon (Aristotle), 200

Outline of a New System of Logic (G. Bentham), 154

Owen, Richard, 68

Oxford and Cambridge Act, 213

Oxford Declaration, 58

Oxford movement, 21, 54

Oxford University, 165, 328n34, 355n130; Oriel Noetics, 155

Paley, William, 37, 45, 52–53, 101, 105, 131, 318n56, 322n55, 329–30n52, 331n79

Paley Marshall, Mary, 96

Panton, D. B., 34, 317n38

Papal Aggression, 21

Parentalia (J. Venn of Clapham), 1–3, 282–83

Paris (France), 39

Pascal, Blaise, 111; Pascal’s wager, 142–43

Peacock, George, 81–82, 327n9, 343n15

Peano, Giuseppe, xix, 187

Pearson, E. S., 352n96

Pearson, J. B., 89, 91, 97

Pearson, Karl, 122, 232–33, 239–40, 352n93, 352–53n97

Peile, John, 94–95

Peirce, C. S., xx, 107, 116–17, 120, 125, 133, 141, 149–51, 156, 169–70, 177, 187, 192, 194, 196–97, 202–5, 247, 259, 264–66, 338n54, 345n52, 347n93

Perowne, Edward Henry, 145–46

Perse, Stephen, 271, 318n51

Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, The (Whewell), 103, 254

Ploucquet, Gottfried, 198–99, 390–40n8

Poisson, Siméon Denis, 104–5, 121

Pólya, George, 334n64

positivism, 56, 74, 77, 98

pragmatism, xvii, 117, 125–26, 139, 141, 143, 162, 244, 247, 253, 256, 264–65

Preliminary Discourse (Herschel), 103, 160

Previous Examination (“Little-Go”), 37–38, 45, 83, 94

Principia (Newton), 187

Principia Mathematica (Whitehead and Russell), 204, 263, 265, 358n100

Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic, The (Venn), 69, 149, 151, 162, 176, 209, 221, 242, 245–46, 264–66, 272, 294; criticism of, 249–50; foundations of logic, 250–53; key elements of, 243–44; and induction, 253–55; logic, definition of, 248; originality of, 248; practic, 258–59; scientific methodology, 243, 250, 256; second edition of, 261–62, 267; as standard work, 263

Principles of Mathematics (Russell), 208, 358n100

Principles of Political Economy (Mill), 61, 66–67

Principles of Psychology (James), 247, 265

Principles of Psychology (Spencer), 170–71

Principles of Science (Jevons), 162, 165, 242–43, 249

Principles of the Algebra of Logic (Macfarlane), 173

probability theorems: as experimental, 117; as formal, 117

probability theory, xvii, xix, 77, 98, 102, 104, 108, 120, 178, 217–18, 230, 244, 263, 333n24, 333n35; apologetics, 135; a priori tendency of, 111; belief in God, 133–34; classical, 112, 121; and counterfactuals, 106, 110; frequency view of, 106–7, 110, 121; and induction, 120, 264; inductive logic, 247; inference about things, 110, 115; and logic, 103, 105–6; proportions, probability of, 122; and testimony, 134–35

propositions, 73, 155, 157, 164, 166, 173–75, 181, 183, 185, 188–89, 207, 247–49, 256, 344n40, 344–45n49; categorical propositions, 153, 158, 204; diagrammatic representations of, 187, 191; existential import of, 172, 184, 191; logical form of, 152, 154, 177, 182, 206; mathematical, 348n111; particular, 115, 186, 192–94, 203, 205, 246, 345n52, 347n93; probability of, 122; proportional, 107–8, 115, 117, 119; universal, 107–8, 186, 192, 246

Provident Medical Institution, 294

psychophysics, 222, 234, 236

Queens’ College, Cambridge, xviii, 306, 310n17

Queen’s College, London, 20, 94

Quetelet, Adolphe, 65, 71, 104–5, 108, 134, 227–30, 333n18; error law, 113–14

Quine, W. V., 185, 208

Ramsay, Louisa J. W., 286, 349n13

Ramsey, Frank, xvii, 102–3, 124, 141, 263–65

Ransome, Arthur, 64, 294

Read, Carveth, 150–51, 169–70, 220, 245, 250, 342–43n77, 356n28

Reichenbach, Hans, 120, 163, 334n64

Reid, J. S., 291, 351n57

Reid, Thomas, 65, 322n55

Religious Tract Society, 335n6

Ricardo, David, 85

Ridgeway, William, 272, 293

Rivers, W. H. R., 235

Roberts, E. S., 213, 288–91, 293, 327n5

Robertson, George Croom, 162, 179, 222, 341n49

Robertson, Robert P., 266

Romaine, William, 9

Romanes, George, 288

Romanism, 131–32

Routh, E. J., 40

Royal Graham Commission, 81, 327n17

Royal Society, xv, xviii, 122, 209, 217–18, 229, 232, 352n92

Royal Statistical Society, 231

Ruskin, John, 64, 67, 217

Russell, Bertrand, xvii, xix–xx, 149–50, 155, 157, 178, 187, 204–5, 207–8, 217–18, 244, 246, 262–65, 358n98

Russell, John, 82

Rye, Walter, 276, 277

Sanderson, Robert, 356n35

Savile Club, 332n104

Scheffler, Hermann, 191, 344–45n49

Schools Inquiry Commission, 94

Schröder, Ernst, 150–51, 156, 177, 191, 197–98, 202–7, 263, 347n93, 347n96, 348n107, 358n100; Frege, dispute between, 346n74

“Science of History” (Venn), 61, 70, 73–78, 98, 105

Scotland, 68. See also Britain

Scott, Sir Walter, 303

secularism, xx, 43, 56, 141–42, 289, 298; academic culture, 218; approaches to, 83, 145; curriculum, 100; identity, 61; positivism, 56–57

Sedgwick, Adam, 81–82, 319n75, 327n9

Seeley, John, 9, 53–55, 68–69, 99, 129, 213, 218, 270, 288, 300, 322n61, 322n64, 362n90

Seeley, R. B., 9

Segner, Johann Andreas von, 198

Shanks, William, 225–26

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 62–63

Sidgwick, Henry, xv, xvii, xx, 61, 67, 79, 85, 87–88, 91, 96–100, 105, 129, 145–47, 179, 210, 212–14, 216–17, 220, 222, 234–36, 244, 247, 249, 262–63, 265–68, 292, 295, 300, 328n26, 329n47, 329n51, 331n99, 338n80, 339n81, 350n47, 358n94, 358n104; ethics, contribution to, 218; as reformer, 93–95

Sierra Leone, 25

Sigwart, Christoph, 150–51, 172–73, 222, 243, 245–46, 250

Simeon, Charles, 6–7, 9, 128

“Sims,” 9

Skeat, Walter W., 95

Skelton, Thomas, 319n76

Skolem, Thoralf, 207, 348n111

Smith, Adam, 85

social science, xx, 65–66, 70–77, 98, 101, 105

Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor, 8

Society for Psychical Research, 216–17

Society of Antiquarians of London, 274

Somerset, Ralph Benjamin, 97

Sorley, W. R., 97, 262

Spalding, William, 165, 180

Sparrow, Lady Olivia B., 24

Spencer, Herbert, 150–51, 153–54, 161, 170–71, 210, 214, 245

St. Andrews University, 165

Stanley, Arthur, 52, 129, 130, 146–47, 339n88

statistics, 223–24, 228, 279

Stephen, Caroline, 45, 92, 295–97, 349n12

Stephen, Catherine (née Venn), 294, 296–97

Stephen, James, 8, 12, 64, 296

Stephen, James Fitzjames, xv, 8, 19, 58–59, 61–62, 67, 69, 74, 77, 132, 211, 282, 300, 323n92, 326n60, 326n79, 349n3, 351n62

Stephen, Leslie, xv, 8, 16, 19, 52, 58–59, 67, 69–70, 98, 147, 211–12, 215–16, 218, 222, 268, 270, 279, 295–98, 323n93, 331n99, 332n104, 338n62

Stewart, Dugald, 65, 322n55

Stillingfleet, James, 7

Stirling, James Hutchinson, 89, 91

Stokes, George Gabriel, 99, 225, 317n46

Stokes, H. P., 273

Stout, George, 217, 220–21, 262, 266, 350n47

Strachey, Edward, 52

Stuart, James, 94–95

Stuart dynasty, 4

Studies and Exercises in Formal Logic (J. N. Keynes), 186

Sully, James, 214, 250–51, 353n100, 356n28

Swete, H. B., 289

Switzerland, 39, 60

Sykes, Nicholas, 9

Symbolic Logic (Venn), xxii–xxiii, 149, 151, 162, 169, 179, 187, 192, 194–95, 197, 209, 222, 242, 244–45, 261, 263, 266, 272, 344n35, 344–45n49, 346n80, 346n87, 347n97; “class” and “compartment,” 343n20; De Morgan, reference to, 205; existential import of propositions, 172, 176–77, 184–86, 191, 246; first edition of, 178, 200, 203, 205–6, 345n52, 347n91, 347n98; Jevon’s nonexclusive interpretation of disjunction, adoption of, 205; Laws of Thought, as commentary on, 181, 184, 198, 203, 205; logic of relations, 205–6; as milestone, 198; notations, 200, 202; second edition of, 191, 193, 196, 202, 205–7, 347n97; as standard textbook, 208

System of Logic, A (Mill), xvi, 61, 66–68, 70–72, 77, 96, 103–6, 155, 159, 164–65, 242, 244, 262, 358n98; syllogism (petitio principii charge), theory of, 245, 250, 255–56

Tarski, Alfred, 207

Taylor, Samuel, 7

Taylor, Sedley, 95

Temple, Frederick, 59

Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 53–54, 62–64, 67–68, 108–9, 140, 217, 244, 324n8

Thackeray, William Makepeace, 69

Thomson, J. J., 236

Thomson, William, 153, 165, 259, 340n9, 343–44n34, 344n41, 353n106

Thornton, Henry, 8

Thornton, John, 128

Thornton, Marianne, 15

Tillyard, Aelfrida, 216

Times Book Club, 294

Todhunter, Isaac, 37, 39, 104–5, 178, 218

Tractatus (Wittgenstein), 264

Treatise on Man (Quetelet), 105

Treatise on Probability (J. M. Keynes), 122, 263, 358n105

Treatise on Universal Algebra (Whitehead), 203, 358n100

Trendelenburg, Friedrich Adolf, 334n62

“Truth and Probability” (Ramsey), 265

Ueberweg, Friedrich, 344n40, 344n41

United States, 150–51, 208, 243, 264–65, 285, 299

Universities Test Act, 213–14, 217

University of Cambridge. See Cambridge University

“Use of Hypotheses, The” (Venn), 169

utilitarianism, 98

Varieties of Religious Experience (James), 295

Veitch, John, 165, 199

Venn, Arthur Dennis, 212, 285, 362n72

Venn, Catherine (née King), 8

Venn, Dennis (1648–95), 3

Venn, Edward (1717–80), 4

Venn, Emilia (aunt), 18–20, 49, 282

Venn, Henrietta, 10–12, 14, 18, 49, 126, 211–12, 295, 297, 349n12

Venn, Henry of CMS (father), 1, 8–11, 13–21, 24–27, 29, 32–33, 42, 43, 44, 47–51, 53, 58, 60, 79–80, 86, 89, 91–93, 105, 125, 126, 128–30, 132–33, 136–37, 141, 145–47, 212, 214, 216, 283–85, 312n56, 317n28, 320n15, 336n13, 336n16, 337n34, 349n3; Christian Observer, editor of, 336n20; death of, 210

Venn, Henry of Huddersfield (great-grandfather), xvi, 1, 4–7, 312n63

Venn, Henry of Walmer (brother), 11–12, 14, 18, 68, 126, 129, 210, 212, 284–86, 296, 349n13, 362n72

Venn, Henry of Yelling, 286

Venn, Henry Straith, 349n13

Venn, Jane Catherine (aunt), 8, 45, 211

Venn, John, xv, xviii, xix, 85, 91, 94–96, 126–28, 130–31, 156–57, 159, 161, 170, 204, 216, 220, 238, 267–68, 275, 287–90, 292–93, 295, 297–99, 302, 314n115, 314n120, 314n125, 316n12, 317n28, 317n32, 317–18n50, 319n84, 320n15, 322n61, 322n64, 323n85, 323n93, 324n103, 324n8, 326n75, 326n76, 328n22, 328n24, 331n99, 332n104, 333n24, 333n32, 334n50, 334n62, 334–35n65, 336n13, 339n81, 343n15, 344n41, 345n52, 347n94, 347n96, 348n102, 349n12, 350n47, 352n91, 352n92, 353n99, 354n119, 357n61, 359n7, 361n63, 362n90, 364n11, 364n21, 364–65n29; Admissions to Gonville and Caius, 269, 271; algebra, conversion to, 22; algebraic logic, 180–83, 186; algebraic logic, material reading of, 168; analytic part of reasoning, 183; Annals of a Clerical Family, xxi, 2, 140, 209–10, 212, 269, 280, 282, 284–86, 291, 306; anthropometry, 234, 237; arguments, as inductive inference, 176; assumptions, form of, 251–53; as “Baconian,” 103; Bernoulli, criticism of, 112–14; on Boole’s system, 167–69, 177–81, 183, 186, 203, 342n94, 346n80, 347n91; botany, interest in, 306; as Broad Churchman, xvi, 59, 129, 132–33, 144, 146–48; Buckle, influence on, 70–71, 73–74; at Cambridge, 62–65, 79–81, 96–97, 100, 107; Cambridge analytical philosophy, forefather of, 217; Cambridge University Library, donation to, 209, 221; childhood of, 1–3, 10–20; clerical life of, 47–59; compilation, approach to, 276; conceptualism, rejection of, 246; conceptualism, treatment of, 166; conventionalism of, 171, 176; copula, 347n93; counterfactuals, 110; crisis of faith, xvi; criticism of, 121–22; as curate, 43–44, 47–51, 55–56; death of, 305–6; “de-conversion,” 54–55; and discontinuity, 280; disjunction, 183; division of classes, as dichotomy, 168, 182; Early Collegiate Life, 276, 280, 283, 291; early education of, 20–23; early informal education of, 23–26; early religious development of, 54–56; emotional logic, xvi; Eranus Society, joining of, 99; Essays and Reviews, reaction to, 56–60; on ethics, 89, 329–30n52; Evangelicalism of, 41–43, 46–47, 54–56, 100; Evangelicalism, abandoning of, 210; Evangelicalism, alienation from, 59–60; Evangelicalism, critical of, 125; as evangelical pensioner, 29–34; existential import, 176–77, 185–86; existential question, 184–85; extensionalism, commitment to, 183; family history, 282–86; “father of probability,” 107; first publication of, 70; as forgotten, 266; as “fossil,” 304; Frege, rejection of, 207–8; frequency view of probability, 102–3, 107, 110–11, 113, 118, 122–23, 226; Galton, collaboration with, 114, 134, 222, 238–41, 354n127; “gentle leisure” of, 294; at Gonville and Caius College, 28–33, 35, 37, 42; Grote, influence on, 98–99; “historian’s dilemma,” 291; historical methodology of, 277–79; Holy Orders, resigning of, xvi–xvii, 209–13, 217, 269; Holy Orders, taking of, xvi, 33, 35, 42, 45–47, 60, 79, 178; hypotheticals, treatment of, 348n105; indifference, principle of, 118; and induction, 104, 167–68, 253–55; inductive logic, 77–78, 159, 163; inferences, 117; infinity, notion of, 110; inverse probability, 117–18, 334n49; isolation, feelings of, 17–18; Jevons, rejection of, 163; Knightbridge Professorship, xvii, 88, 210, 218, 258; knowledge, conditional nature of, 245; legacy of, 261–62; library of, xvii, 199; “literary study” of, 64; “Little-Go,” 45; logic, conceptualist v. materialist camps, 161–62, 165; logic, definition of, 248–49, 356n35; logic, as dualistic, 257; logic, empirical system of, 250; logic, material view, 166, 169–73, 176; logic and mathematics, belief in, 183–84; logical machines, 194–97; The Logic of Chance, xx, xxii–xxiii, 62, 77–78, 88, 98–99, 101–22, 124–25, 133–36, 138–39, 149, 162, 166, 178, 210, 214, 222, 224, 226–31, 236, 242, 244, 250, 254, 261, 263, 266, 272, 329n38, 333n18, 333n35, 334n64, 352n86, 357n70; logic of relatives, 205, 347n98; Logik, review of, 172–73; on Marquand’s diagram, 345n70; marriage of, 91–93; and Mill, 61, 65–67, 72, 106, 244–45, 255–56; Mind, as coeditor, 217–18; miracles, discussion of, 135–36; modern logic, 346n74; Monro, influence on, 64; moral sciences, approach to, xvii; Moral Sciences Club, 97; moral sciences lectures, 99, 328n30; Moral Sciences Tripos, xvii, xxi, 79, 81–82, 86–88, 100–101, 125, 175–76, 204, 209–10, 234, 244; natural kinds, notion of, 119; nature, effect on, 25–26, 77; as nominal Evangelical, 42; as “non-Millian” follower, 247; novel reading, 68–69; On the Theory of Logic, review of, 169–70; open enquiry, belief in, 132; organized religion, importance of to, 304–5; overlapping identities of, 327n1; Pascal’s wager, rejection of, 142; past, fascination with, 274; as Perse scholar, 35–38; personal conflict of, 60; petitio principii charge against syllogism, 245, 255; philosophy, professionalization of, xvii; political views of, 241, 300–301, 303; positivism, 77; practic, 89, 258–59, 329n51; and pragmatism, 141, 143, 253, 264–65; Principles of the Algebra of Logic, review of, 173–74; The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic, 69, 149, 151, 162, 176, 209, 221, 242–46, 248–56, 258–59, 261–67, 272, 294; probability, and degree of belief, 116–17; probability, and induction, 118; probability series, 117; probability theorems, 117; probability theory, 77, 105–8, 111–12, 133–35, 230; as professional gentleman, 269–71; as professional logician, 149; psychophysics, 234; Quetelet, criticism of, 113–14, 228; randomness, 224–26; rational, drawn to, 64; reference class problem, 118–19; as relativist, reputation of, 249; religion, logic of, 131, 138–39; religious identity of, 26, 58–60; as religious thinker, 133; Royal Society fellowship, 218, 229, 350n48; science, and everyday life, 259–61; scientific method, 159, 256; as self-styled professional, 221; shyness of, 296; single-case probabilities, pragmatist solution to, 117; Sixth Wranglership, 38–41; as skeptic, reputation of, 249; statistical probability, 98–99; statistical work, 223–24, 226, 230–33; syllogism, 183; symbolic logic, 155, 174–76; Symbolic Logic, xxii–xxiii, 149, 151, 162, 169, 176–79, 181, 184, 187, 191–98, 200, 202–3, 205–9, 222, 242, 244–46, 261, 263, 266, 272, 343n20, 344n35, 344–45n49, 345n52, 346n80, 346n87, 347n91, 347n97, 347n98; testimony and evidence, probabilistic approach to, 134–35, 140–41; theory of life, 338n60; Thirty-Nine Articles, 146–47, 212; throwing dice, 110; traditional logic, 164; undergraduate years, 29–41; at University of London, 89, 329n49; upbringing, religious narrowness of, 26–27; “unstable equilibrium” of, 210; Victorian age, shaped by, 77, 269–70, 274, 303–4; Voluntary Theological Examination, 45, 47; walks of, 68, 294–95, 327n5; “way of wranglers,” visualizing things, 344n35; wider reading of, 51–56, 61, 67–68, 77; Wykeham Chair, application for, 221–22. See also Venn diagrams

Venn, John (d. 1594/95), 2

Venn, John Archibald “Archie” (son), xvii–xviii, 209, 214, 271–74, 279, 284, 293–95, 298–99, 302, 306, 360n23

Venn, John of Clapham (grandfather), xvi, 1, 5–8, 24–25, 79–80, 282–86, 299

Venn, John of Hereford (uncle), 9, 16, 18–19, 21, 33, 49, 68, 86, 141, 146, 210, 283

Venn, Louisa (née Ramsay), 296

Venn, Lucy (née Ridgeway), 272, 294–95, 299, 302, 306

Venn, Martha (née Sykes) (mother), 9, 11–12, 214, 216, 311n43, 312n56; death of, 13–14, 20, 26

Venn, Mary (1720/21–91), 4

Venn, Richard (1601–64), 2–3, 284

Venn, Richard (1691–1793), 3–4

Venn, Richard (1718–91), 4

Venn, Susanna (née Edmonstone) (wife), 94–95, 209–10, 214–16, 222, 271, 273, 284, 293–94, 296–97, 299, 302, 330n69; death of, 306; marriage of, 91–93; mental breakdown, 296

Venn, William of Otterton, 2, 213, 284, 286

Venn diagrams, xxiii, 177, 187–89, 192, 195, 344n34, 344n35, 344–45n49, 345n58, 345–46n72; Euler diagrams, as compared to, 188–91, 344n40, 344n43; “Google doodle,” xv; horseshoe method, 189; numbering method, 193–94; particular propositions, representation of, 192–94; propositions, representing of, 191, 193–94; universal propositions, representation of, 189–92

Victoria, Queen, 304

Victorian era, xviii, xxiii, 2, 7, 43, 45, 52, 55, 64, 68, 70, 71, 78, 103, 108, 149, 150, 177, 234, 274, 279, 289, 311n40, 338n62; mid-Victorian, xvi, xx, 100, 211, 225, 243, 244, 304, 327n9, 336n16; and Mill, 56, 66–67; and Venn, 77, 269–70, 303–4

von Holland, Georg, 198

von Mises, Richard, 120–21, 334n64

Von Wright, Georg Henrik, 263–64

Vorlesungen (Schröder), 207

Wales, 13, 19, 24–25, 39, 70, 294, 327n5. See also Britain

Wallace, William, 350n47

Wallbridge, Elizabeth, 26

Walton, William, 39

Ward, James, xvii, 179, 220–22, 234–36, 244, 249, 262, 266–67, 300, 350n47, 353n99, 353n199

Wesley, John, 5, 310n9, 310n20

Wesleyan revival, xvi

West Africa, 25

Westcott, Brooke E., 99

Whately, Richard, xix, 149, 151–52, 154–56, 159–61, 165

Whewell, William, xvii, xix, 81, 83, 84, 101, 103, 149–50, 155–56, 159, 162–63, 187, 225, 261, 327n3, 327n9; colligation of, 160–61; De Morgan debate, 254–55; liberal education, ideal of, 82; Mill, debate with, 245, 254; reformed Baconianism, defense of, 161

Whitefield, George, 5

Whitehead, Alfred North, 124, 149–50, 155, 203–5, 263, 265

Whiting, John E., 34, 62, 302

Wigram, Frederic, 126

Wilberforce, Samuel, 57, 349n3

Wilberforce, William, xvi, 8–9, 128

William III, 4

Williams, Rowland, 59, 323n92

“Will to Believe, The” (James), 140

Wilson, Daniel, 10, 21

Wilson, Henry B., 59

Wilson, John Cook, 222

Wissenschaftslehre, 172–73

Wissler, Clark, 240

Witherby, Cornelius, 315–16n7

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 131, 264–65, 314n127; certainty, pragmatic analysis of, 141

women’s higher education, 94–95, 294

women’s suffrage, 301

Woolf, Virginia, 8, 296

World War I, xvii–xviii, xxiii, 265, 300–303, 305

Wright, Aldis, 97

Wrinch, Dorothy, 124, 263–64

Wundt, Wilhelm, 170, 222, 234, 236, 243, 246, 250, 353n108

Wykeham Professorship of Logic, 221–22, 351n59

Xavier, St. Francis, 137, 337n34