BOOKS.

W. STANLEY JEVONS.* IN this volume Mrs. Jevons has done her best to bring the reader into direct contact with her husband's mind and heart. His impressions, feelings, and experiences are described in his own words. Considering that Stanley Jevons was all through his life a particularly shy man, there is every reason to be grati- fied with the result. We have here, in fact, a singularly full and rich record of a memorable mental history. That such a memoir has been possible, is due to two chief circumstances. For one thing, Jevons kept a journal from the age of seventeen to the date of his marriage, and the editor has made extensive use of this. In addition to this, while be was by no means an effusive letter-writer in a general way, his strong family attach- ments, and the fact that he was from early life always at a considerable distance from some members of his family, led him to open up his mind with a rare fullness and completeness to a chosen few, and these letters have fortunately been preserved. In truth, so ample was the material, that Mrs. Jevons tells us she could easily have filled two volumes with the letters alone.

How far this will prove a popular Life we cannot venture to predict. Perhaps Stanley Jevons hardly offers the conditions of a striking and picturesque biography. There is too little of imposing external circumstances, of dramatic collision between the individual will and its environment, to make a Life like that, say, of Johnson or Carlyle. All that is given us is the record of a calm, uninterrupted flow of activity towards a well. conceived and worthy end,—of the self-realisation of a youthful purpose, hemmed-in, no doubt, for a time by obstacle, but never seriously jeopardised. Not only so, it must be admitted that the mental history which forms the real subject of this memoir is not of the most brilliant and captivating kind. One might easily miss not only those social developments of wit and playful fancy which his retired habits discouraged, but those complex and many-hued feelings which seem to be the necessary product of a wide and intimate sympathy with the life of our age and a habit of letting the imagination brood over its many dark problems. And looked at in this way, as a subject lacking the highest quality of a great life, at once assimilative and produc- tive alike on the intellectual, the emotional, and the spiritual side, the story of Jevons's career might easily appear to be told at excessive length.

Yet, when all this is said, the fact remains that to those who knew Stanley Jevons, he will always appear as a man of rare moral worth whom it was a high privilege to know ; and it was clearly worth while to take some pains to im- press on those who knew him merely as an accomplished man of science and profound thinker, that he was a real and even a striking moral personality as well. That the pursuit of scientific truth absorbed most of his intellectual energies and a good part of his emotions is certain. But then, he conceived of science in a reverent and religious way, which transformed it into an object worthy of a good man's highest endeavour. One can see, too, that to him even the most abstruse science was something to be made helpful to his fellow-creatures. Even logic itself was to be turned to practical account in the shape of a mechanical inven- tion which should save human labour by exhibiting in a simple and unerring way all legitimate combinations of any given ideas. In political economy, again, Jevons was no less touched than his predecessor, MIII, by the humane side of his subject. Some of his smaller contributions to his subject--e.g., the article on" Married Women in Factories "—show how deeply he felt the social and economic evils that surrounded him. Not only so, there is in Jevons's life a high moral significance. We can see in it the stability which comes from a high purpose firmly kept to, the force that resides in quiet resolve if only persistent enough, and the way in which ambition of the noblest kind can always justify itself as perfectly sane. Perhaps, indeed, in these days, which have given us so much of stormy biography, the record of a career like that of Stanley Jevons is specially valuable. One can hardly imagine a more wholesome bit of reading for the youth of our generation than the letters and selections from the journal which depict the growth and ripening of the idea that was to dominate his life.

Of the contents of this volume it is not necessary to speak at any great length. We may trust to our readers getting it into

• Leiters aad Journal of W. Stanley Jevons. Edited by his Wife. London:: Macmillan and Co. 1886.

their own hands, and absorbing at least those portions of it which most strongly appeal to them. It will be enough here to refer to some of the more noteworthy passages in Jevons's life. After taking a good position in the examinations of the University of London, and distinguishing himself, especially in chemistry, Stanley, at the age of nineteen, by the recommenda- tion of his teacher, obtained an appointment as assayer to the Mint at Sydney. Here, separated far from those to whom only he could unbosom his heart, thrust suddenly and a little prematurely into the business of money-getting, at the age when, in an original aud creative mind, vague impulses begin to assume the definite shape of ideas, he was thrown inwards upon himself, and had to solve the problem of life as best he might. And a very arduous problem it proved to be, as we can see from his journal

and his long letters to his sisters. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes might possibly see in the movements of the youth's mind at

this time a crossing of tendencies due to distinct ancestral influences. With a growing consciousness of a destiny to explore the dark regions of the unknown, he nevertheless has to recon- cile his young ambitions with those business, like habits of mind which have been fostered by paternal and family influences. He will not be a money-grubb.er, that is certain, seeing that he has

glimpses afar off of the lustrous jewels of truth. Yet he is too sensible to despise wealth, and must even satisfy himself, as well as his friends, that he is proceeding according to sound econo-

mical principles. The determination, after three or four years, to throw up a lucrative post was conceived of as a prudent investment :—

"It is perfectly right," he writes to his sister Lacy, "to lay out one's life before one, to invest a large capital in it, as it were, even with the hope of very distant and uncertain returns; this, indeed, is the only way of using life with true economy and effect."

And in another letter to the same sister :— " To abandon a good income of potatoes will be thought madness by all those potato-growing friends who have no idea that corn, milk, and fruit might be raised off the same ground with a little extra trouble."

It is curious to note, too, how spontaneously, apparently, Jevons found his way to his real work in life. He began as a student of

physical science, and all through life he preserved not only a taste, but an eminent capacity for certain lines of physical investigation. Yet at Sydney, at the ago of twenty-three, he had already discovered that he must exchange the physical for

the moral and logical sciences in which, he writes, his forte

would really be found to lie. Eminently noteworthy, too, is the moral side of this crisis. In choosing a life of study and in- vestigation, Stanley Jevons was far enough from merely desiring something more congenial to his personal tastes. Here is his own striking confession of his moral experience to his sisters :—

"I have a second nature within me hidden to the world, yet directing all my behaviour to the world. Towards you this second nature tends strongly to disclose itself, to throw off every covering of reserve or false modesty I cannot, I really believe, exag- gerate to you the intensity of the feelings of my second nature. They are a reality ; I rise up with them before me, and go to bed with them still upon my mind, and never take any ordinary enjoyment but as a relaxation from this pursuit My whole second nature consists of one wish, or one in tention,—viz , to be a powerful good in the world. To be good, to live with good intention towards others, is open to all. To be unselfish, as they term it, to be a pleasant com- panion, or an agreeable fellow in the ordinary range of society, to marry a wife and make her comfortable, and so on, are all different ways of being good. But they seem to one to be very circumscribed and rather indulgent ways of doing it. To be powerfully gool, that is, to be good, not towards ono, or a dozen, or a hundred, hut towards a nation or the world, is what now absorbs me." (pp. 95 6.)

The thorough self-knowledge which Jevons acquired in these years of solitude (a knowledge which shows itself in some re- markably accurate remarks on the peculiarities of his mind) was

needed to give him the strength for the long labour of achieve-, ment. One can safely say that his natural timidity and self.

distrust would have proved an insuperable obstacle to success, but for the well-founded assurance reached in this period of self- scrutiny.

The rest of the book is, in the main, the history of the con-

scientious fulfilment of the Sydney pledges. The resolute setting to study again at the age of twenty-four at University College,

the first ventures in literary production, the earnest combattings with his shyness, the opening up of a career at Owens College, Manchester, the swift coming of public recognition not only by scientific experts, but by practical statesmen,—all this has its own interest too. It is needless to say that Jevons's good-sense

was eqnal to the ordeal of success, which never spoilt him, while it was adequately appreciated. The later letters do not, we think,

contain anything of the absorbing interest that belongs to the early ones from Australia. Those that deal with his scientific work are not numerous or lengthy, but they are important as showing a singularly candid and gentle attitude in relation to his critics. He had something of a child's firm conviction of his own rightness, combined with a child's openness of mind to others' ideas. If there was any exception to this, it was in dealing with Mill's writings, towards which he betrays an anti- pathy that can only be explained by a strong conviction of their harmful influence. On matters outside the range of his special studies, the observations embodied in the letters are a little meagre. Now and again, indeed, we get a pregnant remark on passing politics which shows how strong his political feelings could be. Yet, as he himself tells us, he felt, in the main, that politics were not his sphere. Indeed, to the scientific mind, habituated by its whole study to the idea that there is some one proposition which is the sole and the complete theory of any given set of facts, the nicely balanced and essentially uncertain region of political events must always seem a hopeless chaos.

Of lighter topics, general literature occupies a very subor- dinate place indeed. On the other hand, music receives a good deal of attention. His love of it was genuine and broad. He learnt towards the end of his painfully arrested life to enjoy composers so unlike the classical favourites of his youth as Berlioz and Wagner. Jevons had a strong bent towards travel, which sprang in part oat of the recurring weariness and restlessness that are common to brain-workers, partly out of a thoroughly unsophisticated enjoyment of natural scenery, and partly, too, out of his exploring instincts. He visited South and North America at the end of his stay in Australia, and later on formed the habit of spending a month or two every summer in Norway. His letters from this delightful retreat of weary brains are pleasant reading, even though they fail to say much that is new on a well-worn theme, and though they make no pretence at elaborate pictorial description.

So reticent a mind as that of Stanley Jevons could not be expected to expatiate at length on its religious experiences. Yet there is evidence enough in this volume to show that religion entered into aud coloured his views of nature and of human life. Brought up in that Unitarian faith which seems to repress the emotional to. the advantage of the intellectual element in religion, Stanley Jevons seems in his younger days to have drifted off into pure humanitarianism, as formulated in a passage of Jane Eyre. The wide range of his scientific investi- gation brought him face to face with the religious problem in a new form. And nothing in the volume is more interesting than the way in which the consciousness of a Divine presence grew more distinct as the years rolled by. Jevons was the very embodiment of the modesty of science. In the quotations given us from the projected but uncompleted Tenth Bridgwater Treatise, Mrs. Jevons has prepared a genuine surprise for those who loosely classed her husband with the irreligious scientific teachers of the age. If his characteristic cautiousness pre- vented his accepting any definite form of dogmatic creed, this same cautiousness made him impatient at the dogmatic nega- tions of so-called science, and this feeling of reverent recognition of the possibilities that lie beyond the bounds of positive know- ledge is here expressed with an eloquence that contrasts strongly with his customary quiet manner of scientific exposition.

After all, however, it should be remembered, in estimating the value of this biography, that in the case of Jevons, as of all great thinkers and originators, his life was emphatically his work. Into this he put the best of himself, and it is as a careful investigator and fertile thinker, as a systematiser of the methods of physical science, and a reducer of one important branch of moral science to an exact quantitative form, that Stanley Jevons claims the admiration and gratitude of his country. In view of this vast and absorbing life-work, the reader should judge leniently of any social or other small deficiencies. And this all the more readily, seeing how much of what is most estimable and loveable combined in him to make him, with all his devotion to the things of the intellect, an affectionate brother, a tender husband, a helpful friend, and an upright citizen.