Venn, John

Venn, John 1834-1923, logician and man of letters, was born at Drypool, Hull, 4 August 1834, the elder son of the Rev. Henry Venn [q.v.], then rector of that parish. Descended from a Devonshire family of considerable intellectual distinction, his grandfather was the Rev. John Venn, the leader of the Clapham Evangelicals, and his great-grandfather was Henry Venn, sometime vicar of Huddersfield. Venn was educated first at Sir Roger Cholmley's School, Highgate (now Highgate School), to which place his father had removed upon becoming honorary secretary of the Church Missionary Society, and subsequently at Islington. In October 1853 he entered Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, representing the eighth generation of his family to be admitted to (and to graduate at) Cambridge, or the sister university, and beginning an association with Gonville and Caius College which lasted for seventy years. Elected mathematical scholar in the following year, he took his degree, as sixth wrangler, in January 1857, and was elected fellow of his college a few months later.

Rigidly brought up in the family tradition, it is not surprising that Venn prepared himself for holy orders. Ordained deacon at Ely in 1858, and priest in 1859, he held curacies successively at Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, and at Mortlake, Surrey. After this short experience of parochial work he returned to Cambridge and Caius College in 1862, and was appointed Catechist, later converted to the post of College Lecturer in moral science.. Since taking his degree, Venn's attention had been directed more and more to the works of philosophical and metaphysical writers. Augustus De Morgan's treatises, George Boole's 'Laws of Thought', John Austin's 'Jurisprudence', and, most of all, John Stuart Mill's 'Logic' so affected him as to cause a revolution in his critical outlook which 'Essays and Reviews' (1860) could not counter. Upon resuming academic life, moreover, he found himself in close contact with such men as Henry Sidgwick, J. R. Seeley, Isaac Todhunter, and John Westlake, while outside Cambridge he saw much of his cousins, E. J. S. and A. V. Dicey, and James and Leslie Stephen. It had long ceased to be regarded as an anomaly for a clergyman to preach the then circumscribed evangelical creed and at the same time, without the slightest insincerity, to devote himself actively to philosophical studies; yet, some years later (1883), finding himself still less in sympathy with the orthodox clerical outlook, Venn availed himself of the provisions of the Clerical Disabilities Act. Of a naturally speculative frame of mind, he was wont to say in after-life that, owing to subsequent change in accepted opinion regarding the Thirty-nine Articles, he could consistently have retained his orders; he remained, indeed, throughout his life a man of sincere religious conviction. As Hulsean lecturer in 1869 he published 'Some Characteristics of Belief, Scientific and Religious'.

For the next thirty years Venn devoted himself to the study and teaching of logic, at the outset, owing to his mathematical training, paying particular attention to the theory of probability. His first published work was 'The Logic of Chance' (1866), which owed its inception to H. T. Buckle's well-known discussion concerning the impossibility of checking the statistical regularity of human actions. Similarly, 'Symbolic Logic' (1881) represented a successful attempt, hitherto neglected even by W. S. Jevons, to rationalize and interpret the mechanism of Boole's processes. Many years earlier Venn had adopted the diagrammatic method of illustrating propositions by inclusive and exclusive circles, and he now added the new device of shading the segments of the circles in order to represent the possibilities excluded by the propositions. The moral science Tripos was then attracting a growing number of students, among whom were to be found men of such promise and ability as Arthur Balfour, William Cunningham, F. W. Maitland, James Ward, and F. W. H. Myers. As lecturer and examiner Venn played an important part in the development of this Tripos, which was characterized by freedom from extraneous control and rested, as is essential with a new subject, upon a friendly intercourse between teachers and taught. In 1889 he completed his trilogy by issuing 'The Principles of Empirical Logic', which, in common with its predecessors, at once became a standard text-book. During this period of his life Venn gradually acquired what was probably the largest private collection of works upon logic ever brought together; this he presented to the University Library in 1888.

Thereafter, apart from lecturing and preparing fresh editions of his books and writing monographs upon statistical and anthropometrical subjects, Venn's activities were devoted to the hitherto neglected subject of university history. In this field his largest single-handed undertaking was represented by the three volumes of the Biographical History of Gonville and Caius College (1897), which involved a vast amount of painstaking and methodical search among university, Episcopal, and other records. He also edited several volumes of the University Archives, e.g., 'Grace Book' (1910) and, with his son, 'Matriculations and Degrees', 1544-1659 (1913). 'Venn Family Annals' appeared in 1904, and in 1913 he brought together, under the title of 'Early Collegiate Life', many of his own writings and speeches descriptive of Cambridge life and habits in bygone periods. In 1910 he produced 'John Caius, a biographical sketch'. Finally, during his latter years, he collaborated with his son in the preparation of the monumental 'Alumni Cantabrigienses', the first two volumes of which (1922) he lived to see in print.

Venn took the Cambridge Sc.D. degree in 1883, and was elected F.R.S. the same year. He married in 1867 Susanna Carnegie, eldest daughter of the Rev. Charles Welland Edmonstone, and had one child, John Archibald, president of Queens' College, Cambridge, since 1932. Of spare build, he was throughout his life a fine walker and mountain climber, a keen botanist, and an excellent talker and linguist. He died at Cambridge 4 April 1923, and was buried at Trumpington. At the time of his death he had been a fellow of his college for sixty-six years, and its president since 1903.

There is a portrait of Venn by C. E. Brock in the combination room of Gonville and Caius College.

[Based on the entry by John Archibald Venn for the 'Dictionary of National Biography'].