Abstract
WILLIAM STANLEY JEVONS, whose tragical death was recorded in our issue of the 17th inst., (P. 377), was born at Liverpool in 1835. As in the case of most men of intellectual work, the facts of his life are few and simple. He was educated partly in Liverpool, partly at University College, London, where he particularly distinguished himself in the classes of mathematics and natural science. For University College Jevons ever retained feelings of the warmest loyalty. He was proud of his connection with it and with the London University, and doubtless these feelings weighed with him when in 1876 he resigned his chair at the Owens College and accepted that of Political Economy at University College. Before completing his career as a student, Jevons accepted an appointment in the Sydney Mint and spent five years (1854–59) in practical work abroad. At the close of that time his disinterested determination to devote his life and energies to intellectual work of the highest kind prompted him to return to England and to resume his interrupted studies. He graduated at London in 1862 with the highest distinction in logic and political economy, and a year later began his active career as a teacher in the capacity of general teacher at the Owens College, a post he occupied for three years. Even at this early period of his life, however, he had already produced not only an earnest of his great powers but the germs of all the best work he afterwards accomplished. A pamphlet on the Fall in the Value of Gold, and an important work on the probability and consequences of the exhaustion of coal sufficiently attested his mastery over concrete problems of economics. But of even greater significance was the short paper presented in 1862 to the British Association on quantitative reasoning in economical theory and the little noticed volume on Pure Logic (1864). The one contains the fundamental notions of the axithor's later owork in theoretical political economy, the other the first principles and outlines of the development of his well-known symbolical logic. In 1866 Jevons was appointed to the combined chair of Philosophy and Political Economy at the Owens College, and for ten years he discharged with the greatest ability and success the onerous duties of the office. During this time his practical activity was incessant and his intellectual labour continuous. In political economy his occasional contributions in the shape of papers in the Statistical Society's Journal, addresses or reviews, his important treatise, the Theory of Political Economy (1871), and his excellent manual on logic, his tract Money; or, The Substitittion of Similars, his Elementary Lessons on Logic, and his great work, the Principles of Science (1874), raised his reputation to the highest point, and it may be confidently said that no man ever obtained or deserved so thoroughly to obtain more widespread recognition as a master in these departments of knowledge. In 1876 the feeling that his time might with greater advantage to himself and the public be devoted to continuing his original researches, prompted his resignation of the laborious chair at Owens College. In that year he migrated to London and to University College, and for five years he continued to hold the chair of Political Economy in that institution. The same desire for more time induced him in 1881 to resign the comparatively light duties of his London chair, and he was doubtless enjoying the feeling of perfect freedom to devote himself to his beloved work when the abhorred shears cut short the thin spun thread of his life. A great force for good and a noble type of the man of science has been lost to us in Jevons.
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William Stanley Jevons . Nature 26, 420–421 (1882). https://doi.org/10.1038/026420a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/026420a0