A Prodigy of Universal Genius: Robert Leslie Ellis, 1817-1859

Front matter

Lukas M. Verburgt Editor

A Prodigy of Universal Genius: Robert Leslie Ellis, 1817-1859

[OPEN ACCESS. A Springer

Introduction

Most of the chapters in this volume originated at a conference held at Trinity College, Cambridge, in September 2018. The conference brought together a number of leading scholars who shared an interest in the largely forgotten but fascinating figure of Robert Leslie Ellis (1817—1859). Some had arrived at Ellis from their work in the history of statistics and probability theory or Bacon scholarship. Others knew of him as the Senior Wrangler in the Tripos examination at Cambridge of 1840, as the brother-in-law of William Whewell, the famous Master of Trinity, or as the prodigious early-Victorian polymath who died at the tragically young age of 41. The conference aimed at mapping for the first time (the connections between) Ellis’s life, work and times and, especially, at exploring the different aspects of his polymathy, ranging from its origins at Bath, his home town, and its development at Trinity, where he was a Fellow between 1840 and 1849, to its influence and legacy, inside and outside the walls of Cambridge.

‘History’, it has been said, ‘is unkind to polymaths’.! Some are simply forgotten, while many others are squashed into categories we can still recognize today. Ellis is principally remembered as a mathematician and Bacon scholar, contributing to the Cambridge (and Dublin) Mathematical Journal and co-editing the classic Victorian edition of the Francis Bacon’s works (1857-59), together with James Spedding and Douglas Denon Heath. As far as Ellis was concerned, he cared but little about disciplinary boundaries, in so far as these existed at all at the time.” What interested him were the abstract principles of knowledge and reality — or what his colleague James David Forbes, Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, called the ‘debateable ground which lies on the frontiers of Mathematics and

! Alexander Murray, ed. Sir William Jones, 1746-1794 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), v. For a recent historical study of polymathy see Peter Burke. The Polymath: A Cultural History from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2020).

? For a recent discussion of the origin of disciplines in Victorian Britain see Bernard Lightman and Bennett Zon, eds., Victorian Culture and the Origin of Disciplines (New York & Abingdon: Routledge, 2020).

x Introduction

Metaphysics, of Natural and Mental Philosophy’.* Ellis worked on algebraic, functional and differential equations with as much zeal and pleasure as he read Bacon’s Novum Organum, studied Roman Law and dictated notes on the formation of bees’ cells and a projected Chinese dictionary. Among his peers and contemporaries Ellis was, indeed, known and praised not for one specific work or for one ground-breaking contribution to or achievement in a particular field, but rather for his ‘intellectual character’ and ‘universal genius’.* Ellis applied his genius mostly to the field of mathematics, in which he was rather prolific, but his approach to mathematics was too leisurely to be called professional or specialized. Some even considered mathematics to be ‘the least of his resources’, encouraging him to move beyond the narrow Cambridge bounds of Mathematics and Classics and to pursue research in physical science too. The general sentiment seems to have been that Ellis’s unmistakable genius was such that it allowed him to be a polymath; his was a universal genius, not a mathematical, philosophical, scientific or literary one.° Other factors of course also played a role in Ellis’s polymathic capacity to move between disciplines, such as the lack of pecuniary motivation combined with a personal aversion to narrowness and competition. The same goes for the issue of why, despite or perhaps because of his particular kind of genius and polymathy, Ellis has been largely forgotten. Throughout his life, Ellis struggled with poor health, and from about 1849-50 onwards, when he was only in his early thirties, he became increasingly incapable of doing sustained scholarly work. Ellis had only some ten productive years, which makes one wonder what else he might have done, had his life been longer and his sufferings, both physical and mental, less than they actually were. One name must be mentioned in relation to Ellis’s polymathic genius, that of William Whewell, the towering figure of Victorian science, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Ellis’s brother-in-law.’ It may be said that Ellis was a genius by birth, but it is more interesting to see how his genius was the result of cultivation, which gave it its particular character. What was absolutely crucial in this

3Anonymous. [James David Forbes]. “Robert Leslie Ellis,’ The Athenaeum 1685 (11 February 1860), 205-206, on p. 206.

“George Boole. “On the application of the theory of probabilities to the question of the combination of testimonies or judgments,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 21:4 (1857): 597-653, on p. 597; Francis Galton. Hereditary Genius. 2™ Edition (London: Macmillan, 1892), 18.

>Anon. [Forbes], “Robert Leslie Ellis,” 206.

°For a study of the category of ‘genius’ see, for instance, James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (2013 [1981]). Harvard: Harvard University Press. For an account of the cultural significance of genius in early Victorian Britain see Richard Yeo, “Genius, method, and morality: Images of Newton in Britain, 1760-1860,” Science in Context 2:2 (1988): 257-284.

7On Whewell’s life and work see Menachem Fisch, William Whewell: Philosopher of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Menachem Fisch and Simon Schaffer (eds.), William Whewell: A Composite Portrait (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Richard Yeo, Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge, and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Lukas M. Verburgt (ed.), William Whewell: A New Companion (University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming).

Introduction xi regard was Whewell’s intellectual programme: that of the reform of the Baconian inductive philosophy, a reform informed by a Christian belief in the spiritual character of human knowledge which was meant to apply to, and reshape, all areas of science and society, including natural science, morality, politics and economics.š At the core of this programme stood the hope that science and religion could work in harmony and the resistance against all philosophical and scientific tendencies — materialism, naturalism, utilitarianism — which assumed or advocated that science and religion were in conflict.

Ellis was one of its torchbearers. Upon his arrival at Cambridge, the programme came to inform many of his scholarly endeavours. It was congenial to his mind not so much, or at least not only, because he agreed with all its doctrines, but because it resonated with his kind of polymathy which, much like Whewell’s, was, to use Peter Burke’s phrase, ‘centripetal’: Ellis was interested in, and had a vision of, the unity of knowledge and reality, and believed that its different parts somehow fitted together.” Whewell was, and could be, ‘active’, ‘general’ and ‘serial’ — to use three other typologies from Burke’s The Polymath — in carrying out the twin tasks of defining induction and popularizing it, writing many books and articles on mechanics, political economy, history and philosophy of science, natural theology, education and moral philosophy. Ellis’s polymathy is characterized, first and foremost, by simultaneity: his life was simply too short to move from field to field as the years passed. He did everything all at once. What he did was nothing less than impressive, even when focusing only on work readily identifiable as contributing to the Baconian cause. Among many other things, Ellis provided new foundations for probability theory along Whewellian lines, he canonized a Whewellian interpretation of Bacon in his ‘General Preface’ to the Works of Francis Bacon, and he wrote a paper on the formation of bees’ cells which provided Whewell with further, anti-evolutionary proof of a divine natural order.

The connection between Whewell’s and Ellis’s polymathy does not just consist in its interaction and overlap. It also exhibits a striking parallelism: they were both polymaths who were forgotten almost immediately upon their deaths, Ellis in 1859 and Whewell in 1866. The reason for this may well have been their very polymathy, their particular zeal for ‘universal knowledge’, which met with appreciation and great caution among their colleagues.!° The breadth of their activities had been rather unusual even in an age when it was still possible to move freely between disciplines. By the 1860s, however, the increasing specialization and

8See Laura J. Snyder, Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and Society; and William J. Ashworth, The Creation of Knowledge: Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Sinews of Authority (1812 to 1875) (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2021).

°’ See Burke, The Polymath, 6.

10William Whewell to Rev. G. Morland, 15 December 1815, quoted in Isaac Todhunter, William Whewell. D.D. An Account of His Writings, 2 vols. (London, 1876), vol. 2, 10. Cf. James David Forbes to Robert Leslie Ellis, 14 February 1836, SAUL 293.

xii Introduction professionalization of intellectual life undermined not only the value of their kind of polymathy but also the belief in the unity of science and religion which had inspired it.!!

Perhaps the central question confronting those who read and study Ellis today is not so much the what as it is the how and why of his oeuvre; not the details of this or that paper — Ellis never wrote a book — but the way in which he arrived at, the reason for his decision to write about, the approach he pursued in studying and the connections he saw between the texts he produced. This makes his life key to his work, if only because until 1849, when he was seized with rheumatic fever in San Remo, Ellis lived to read and wrote to live: his was the kind of bookish life where reading and writing was fraught with existential concerns, both personal, intellectual and spiritual.

Ellis’s polymathy offers both an opportunity and a challenge. On the one hand, as borne out in the chapters of this volume, it provides an entry point into wider themes in the history of nineteenth-century British education, academia and scholarship, such as the value and limitations of the Cambridge curriculum, the kind of mental training needed for the Tripos examinations, the changing cultural conceptions of the ‘genius’, and the intersection between philosophy and mathematics in recent developments like symbolic algebra. On another level, the study of a polymath like Ellis also shows that inter-, multi- or even transdisciplinary historical research is not merely often recommendable and profitable but at times simply unavoidable. It would arguably have been impossible for a single author to cover the ground, both in terms of depth and breadth, covered in the chapters making up this book. On the other hand, Ellis’s polymathy makes it very difficult to obtain an exhaustive overview of all the aspects of his life and work, let alone of their many and various overlaps and tensions. Some important topics are here merely touched upon, such as Ellis’s coping with his decade-long illness — from 1849 until his death in 1859 — his study of bees’ cells, which in 1858 was brought to Charles Darwin’s attention,'” and his forays into the study of law, the only field in which he briefly desired academic preferment.

My hope is that this volume will encourage others to take up these topics, allowing for an even richer understanding of Ellis. And my hope for this understanding is that it will not just save Ellis from oblivion or restore him to a place on the early- Victorian Cambridge landscape but that it will also give rise to the study of why someone like him is forgotten and how this crowded landscape changes once he is placed on it (Fig. 1).

11 See, in this context, for instance F.M. Turner, “The Victorian conflict between science and religion: a professional dimension,” [sis 69 (1978): 335-376.

12? See Charles Darwin to W.B. Tegetmeier, 2 October [1858], in F. Burkhardt and S. Smith, eds. The Correspondence of Charles Darwin. Volume 7: 1858-1859. Supplement 1821-1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 160.

Introduction xiii

Fig. 1 Portrait of Robert Leslie Ellis. Taken from a volume of watercolours of eminent pupils of William Hopkins, painted by

T.C. Wageman (TCL, 307. bb.85.95). Reproduced by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge

Robert Leslie Ellis: Life and Work

The aim of this introduction is to provide a brief and cursory overview of Ellis’s life and work that may serve as a background to the chapters that follow.

The mere facts of Robert Leslie Ellis’s life, as Harvey Goodwin noted, are few and simple. ‘It was short, quiet, uneventful, but very full of suffering." Ellis was born on 25 August 1817 in Bath, the youngest of six children of Francis Ellis (1772-1842) and Mary Ellis (née Kilbee) (1777-1847). As a young boy, Ellis spent most of his time in the company of his father, a cheerful, active and well-cultivated man and one of the founders of the Bath Literary and Scientific Institution. His character and way of dealing with his son, as a child, had a great influence on Ellis throughout his life, in which the death of his father in 1842 would be the ‘greatest grief’. From his mother, Ellis is said to have inherited his lifelong tendency towards sickliness and depression, with ‘blue devils’ occasionally haunting him. Ellis received all his education at home from two private tutors, one in classics and another in mathematics, starting in 1825. At the age of ten, he was reading Horace, Virgil and Xenophon as well as Cuvier’s Theory of the Earth, Richard Whately’s Elements of Logic and the Edinburgh Review and had already made a

13 Harvey Goodwin, “Biographical memoir, of Robert Leslie Ellis,” in William Walton, ed. The Mathematical and Other Writings of Robert Leslie Ellis (Cambridge: Deighton, Bell & Co., 1863), iX—XXXVi, on p. xi—xii.

xiv Introduction number-theoretic discovery, recorded by his father.'* By 1830, he was well-versed in mechanics and making rapid progress in the calculus. Due to his frequent conversation with his seniors, and the almost complete lack of interaction with peers, Ellis developed an elderly sobriety of manner that would distinguish him from his contemporaries, making it difficult for others to believe that he had ever been a boy and for him to engage in close bonds of intimacy or friendship.

Since money was not an issue, Ellis was enrolled as a Pensioner at Trinity College, Cambridge, in July 1834. Before going up there, he became a pupil of the Rev. James Challis at Papworth St. Everard, later Plumian Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge, who prepared students for the Cambridge Entrance Examination. Because of ill health, however, Ellis had to disrupt his studies there after 2 months and to delay his entrance to Cambridge. In October 1836 he matriculated at Trinity College as a pupil of George Peacock, the onetime member of the Analytical Society and prominent mathematical reformer, who discovered to his amazement that the 20-year-old Ellis was reading Robert Woodhouse’s [soperimetrical Problems (1810) on the calculus of variations." Unlike other reading men, Ellis studied mathematics on his own and, as his sight was then already weak, largely by making mental notes: he listened to Peacock’s lectures and had such works as J.H. Pratt’s Mechanical Philosophy (1836), the first Cambridge treatise on Laplace’s analytical treatment of the earth’s shape, read to him. But knowing that the all-important Tripos was first and foremost a test of speed and accuracy, in his last terms he had the advantage of the direction of William Hopkins, the famous ‘Senior Wrangler-maker’, if only to arrange his reading and put it in a suitable form.

The Tripos examinations of the 1840s were spread over 6 days, covering ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ questions (then called ‘mixed mathematics’) — more than five hours each day, with Sunday off.'° In Ellis’s year, the examination took place in the Lecture Rooms of Trinity College, but at his special request he was examined privately in a separate room. ‘I am very cool’, Ellis wrote in his diary, “yet shall play a losing game’ (5 January 1840). A few days later, however, he graduated — as Hopkins and Peacock had expected — as Senior Wrangler, going on to win that year’s First Smith’s Prize. In September, there followed the Fellowship Examination. Ellis passed and was elected Fellow of Trinity College in October 1840, with meant that

'4See ‘Untitled document’, Whewell Papers, TCL, Add.Ms.c.67/129. Unless otherwise noted, all further references to ‘TCL’ are to this collection (‘Whewell Papers’).

15 There are two letters from George Peacock to Ellis’s father among the ‘Correspondence of Lady Affleck’ in Trinity College Library. See TCL, Add.Ms.a.79/326-327. On Woodhouse’s influence on Cambridge mathematics, and on the reformers of Charles Babbage, George Peacock and John Herschel in particular, see for example Harvey W. Becher, “Woodhouse, Babbage, Peacock and modern algebra,” Historia Mathematica 7:4 (1980): 389-400.

'©For an account of the development of the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge see, for example, Tony Crilly, “Cambridge. The rise and fall of the Mathematical Tripos,” in Raymond Flood, Adrian Rice and Robin Wilson, eds. Mathematics in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 17-32. For the physical side of the tripos examination, in which context Ellis is somewhat of an anomaly, see Andrew Warwick, Masters of Theory. Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), chapter 4.

Introduction XV he was free from earning a living for several years. Since he did not take Holy Orders, his Fellowship expired in 1849, that is, for 7 years after his MA degree, which he had obtained in 1842.

After taking his degree, Ellis’s ambition was to read for the bar, to which he was duly called in 1840. But in the following years his worldly position unexpectedly changed, with the death of his father and both his elder brothers. Ellis inherited considerable Irish property and was thus deprived of the chief inducement to work as a lawyer. Still, as he ‘loved law in the abstract exceedingly’, he devoted much time to the study of law, leaving behind several notebooks on Roman Law.'’ His ultimate ambition to be appointed Professor of Civil Law would remain unfulfilled, however. At Bath, in 1841-2, Ellis briefly considered entering political life as a Whig candidate for the representation in Parliament of his native city, being attached to Sir William Napier (1785-1860). Nothing came of this and in 1842-3 Ellis returned to Cambridge, making Trinity College his home, though not with any very definite purpose.

During the period of his Fellowship, Ellis undertook, in collaboration with two other Trinity men — James Spedding and Douglas Denon Heath — a complete edition of Francis Bacon’s works, published in seven volumes between 1857 and 1859. Ellis was responsible for the first three volumes, containing the Philosophical Works, for which he wrote several prefaces as well as a 45-page ‘General preface’. An intellectual task much to his taste, Ellis’s contributions to the Works are among the most valuable texts which he has left behind and perfectly indicative of his wide reading and philosophical commitments. Ellis’s emphasis on the need for a reformed Baconian methodology in the “General preface’ was lauded by William Whewell, with whose natural theology and idealist philosophy of science it was largely in agreement. For example, following Whewell, Ellis argued for a view of knowledge in which the individual mind is able to arrive at a priori truths about the world because it shares in the thoughts of the divine mind which created that world. Like Whewell, what Ellis valued in Bacon was the spirit, not the matter of his work: this ‘anti-modern’ spirit was essentially that of the unity of religion and science, of faith and knowledge. As Ellis quoted Bacon: “There is no such opposition between God’s word and His works’, adding that ‘both come from Him who is the Father of lights, the fountain of all truth’ .'® Ellis was not a mere follower of Whewell, however, as he took it as his task to reconcile Whewell’s philosophy of science with other disciplines, notably probability theory, thereby allowing for the possibility that it would need to be updated or reformed.

Bacon and philosophy were just two of Ellis’s many intellectual interests, of which mathematics was perhaps the central one. Ellis always stood in an ambiguous relation to the field in which he was most prolific and to which he made several memorable contributions. On the one hand, he studied mathematics from the age of eight, graduated Senior Wrangler, won the First Smith’s Prize, was a Moderator

17 Goodwin, “Biographical memoir,” xviii. See TCL, Add.Ms.a.218/36-9, a.220/4, a.221/14 and 222/3-8.

lš Robert Leslie Ellis, “General preface to the Philosophical Works,” in SEH 1 (1857): 21-67, on p. 64.

xvi Introduction

(1844) and Examiner (1845) in the Mathematical Tripos, established a new Cambridge tradition by publishing a complete set of solutions to the problems he and his co-moderator, Matthew O’ Brian, had set in 1844, edited several volumes of the Cambridge Mathematical Journal, prepared a masterly report on the recent progress of analysis for the British Association (1846), and wrote some forty papers on various mathematical topics. On the other hand, although he did give some college lectures on higher mathematics, if only as locum-tenens for friends, Ellis never had a private pupil, and never expressed any desire to be appointed professor of mathematics. In fact, when the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics in the University of Cambridge fell vacant in 1849, upon Joshua King’s resignation, Ellis declared that he would not even agree to be nominated as a candidate. ‘[I]t is a mistake to suppose’, wrote Goodwin, ‘that Ellis was in any exclusive or even preponderating degree devoted to mathematics; his mathematical power was no doubt very great, but [...] not greater than several other powers [...]’.!°

During 1847-48 Ellis visited Malvern, a popular spa town, for the benefit of his health, while still making Trinity his headquarters. When the tenure of his Fellowship expired, in 1849, he decided to travel to the Continent, partly for the sake of travelling, partly from the belief that a warmer climate might improve his health and partly to complete his work for the Bacon edition. Ellis travelled to Nice, in the south of France, in the autumn of 1849, aged 32. When he left that town for Rome on 13 December, he was stopped at San Remo, Italy, by a severe attack of rheumatic fever, which for several days put his life in danger. ‘What I have suffered in body & spirits’, he wrote in a letter dated 2 January 1850, ‘I am not very willing to call to mind. So it is here I am, in almost a helpless state, scarcely able to sit up for two or three hours’.”° After staying at San Remo for nearly 3 months, in March 1850 Ellis returned to England an invalid. He visited several places after his return — London, Brighton, Bath, Malvern and Tunbridge Wells — consulting various doctors without any result. In 1853, having given up all hope of recovery, Ellis decided to settle at Anstey Hall in Trumpington, a village two miles from Cambridge of which his friend John Grote — who in 1855 would succeed Whewell as Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy — was vicar. The long end of his short life was a painful process of gradual physical disintegration and a constant looking of death in the face. As he wrote in one of his last letters, of 22 February 1859: ‘[I]t is nearly six years since I have looked forward to six weeks life. The curse of Moses “Thy life shall hang in doubt before thee and thou shall fear day and night and have none assurance of thy life” has been fulfilled here if ever anywhere’.”! At first, he could drive out in a carriage, but eventually he became entirely confined to the house and then to his bed, unable to enjoy the company and conversation of friends.

Despite his worsening physique, Ellis’s intellect remained intact. “It was a wonder to note the perfect action of mind, at a time when the body was a mere distorted

19 Goodwin, “Biographical memoir,” xx. °Robert Leslie Ellis to William Walton, 2 January 1850, TCL, Add.Ms.c.67/12. 2! Robert Leslie Ellis to William Walton, 22 February 1859, TCL, Add.Ms.c.67/45.

Introduction xvii

[...] heap of skin and bones’.” During the first years of his illness, Ellis was still able to give some attention to Bacon, dictating the notes and prefaces which would appear in the Works. It was only in 1853 that he finally handed over his papers to Spedding. After this moment, he could not bear the subject of Bacon to be spoken of. At Anstey Hall, he sometimes managed to amuse himself with various subjects of study, carrying out mathematical investigations “in his head’, that is without pencil and paper, and dictating remarks on such topics as bees’ cells, Roman money, vegetable spirals and the construction of a Chinese dictionary.” Always having been fond of the study of language, Ellis was well-versed in French, German, Italian, Greek and Latin, translated Danish and Spanish ballads, studied Gothic and Sanskrit, and was found one day reading the New Testament in Swedish, a language which he had picked up since he had been ill.

After years of suffering, and no longer able to walk, read or write, Ellis died on 12 May 1859, aged 41, and was buried in Trumpington churchyard.

Ellis’s legacy — or, more precisely, its creation — is a story all in itself, bringing together and dividing his small circle, consisting of Lady Affleck (his sister), William Whewell (his brother-in-law), John Grote, Harvey Goodwin (his ‘official’ obituarist), William Walton (his literary executor and editor of his collected works), John Pilkington Norris (his ‘unofficial’ obituarist), Augustus De Morgan and James David Forbes. Shortly after her brother’s death, Lady Affleck asked Forbes, previously Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh but then just appointed Principal of the United College of St. Andrews, to write the obituary. Forbes accepted, asking William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) for notes on Ellis’s ‘mathematical qualities of mind’.** On De Morgan’s advice, Forbes’s obituary, which would appear in the Athenaeum on 11 February 1860, was distributed by Lady Affleck to Henry Longueville Mansel (Oxford) and George Boole (Queen’s College, Cork).” It was Goodwin rather than Forbes who wrote the ‘Biographical Memoir’, included in the Mathematical and Other Writings of Robert Leslie Ellis (1863), edited, at Lady Affleck’s request, by Walton, who had been Ellis’s closest friend. At one point in his memoir, for which he made good use of some of the recollections of Ellis recorded in Norris’s ‘Notes, privately printed’, Goodwin took issue with Forbes’s otherwise kind and warm-hearted obituary notice.” According to Forbes, there was a parallel between Ellis and his late friend Duncan Farquharson Gregory, the founder of the Cambridge Mathematical Journal who had died in 1844, aged

2 Goodwin, “Biographical memoir,” xxiii.

23 Ellis communicated most of his mathematical investigations, either by dictation or by letter, to William Walton. Only two of these were published in The Mathematical and Other Writings of Robert Leslie Ellis; one on the retardation of sunrise and the other a new solution of a problem in the first book of Newton’s Principia.

24 James D. Forbes to William Whewell, 16 July 1859, TCL, Add.Ms.a.204/127.

25 See Augustus De Morgan to Lady Affleck, 7 December 1859, TCL, Add.Ms.a.202/139. Forbes, in his obituary of Ellis in the Athenaeum, to which it was communicated by De Morgan, refers to an obituary of ‘last May’ in that same magazine. This notice has not been found. The Athenaeum of 14 May does contain an obituary notice of a ‘Charles Robert Leslie’, however.

26 See J.P. Norris, ‘Notes, privately printed (1853-9)’, CUL, Cam.c.859.18.

xviii Introduction

30. Ellis perhaps had more ‘charm of character’, and he may have lacked Gregory’s ‘eccentricity’, but their ‘tastes’, ‘pursuits’ and “mode of life’ were essentially the same.” Goodwin not only questioned the parallel; he disputed that there was a likeness at all. Goodwin’s own memoir, in turn, was ‘reviewed’ by Norris in the Athenaeum in 1864.” Norris lauded Goodwin’s sketch of Ellis the man and scholar, but felt that not enough emphasis had been put on Ellis the devout believer and conservative thinker:

To be a witness against the characteristic tendencies of modern thought; to protest against idolatry of all kinds, — idolatry of intellect, of success, of physical science, of high art, — [...]; to manifest in the very highest efforts of speculation the same principle of obedience and reverence to One who was yet higher [...]; to ascent where few could follow him, and, in those regions of pure intellect, make heard the ever-lasting commandment, Thou shalt have none other gods but One; this seemed to be the appointed purpose of his life and of his death.”

Forbes, Goodwin and Norris each captured something essential about Ellis — the worldly, the scholarly and the religious. At the same time, as their disagreement shows, it is hard to say which of these was most essential and whether, and if so how, they are related and could possibly be reconciled. Ellis, indeed, was a polymath in learning and polymorphous in character. The aim of the present volume is to disentangle these aspects and to re-assemble them into a well-rounded, complex picture of Ellis’s life and work.

Structure of the Book

The structure of the book is as follows. Part I consists of seven chapters, each focusing on a major aspect of Ellis’s life and work, ranging from his home schooling in classics and mathematics (Chaps. 1 and 2, respectively) and his postgraduate Cambridge life (Chap. 3) to his contributions to mathematics (Chap. 4) and probability theory (Chap. 5), his philosophy and Bacon scholarship (Chap. 7) and his religious-mathematical outlook on human knowledge (Chap. 7). After an introductory chapter on Ellis’s archival remains, held at Trinity College, Cambridge (Chap. 8), Part II presents an annotated selection of his diaries and correspondence. Both selections are preceded by a ‘Note to the Reader’ containing background information and editorial remarks. They are followed by three appendices. Appendix 1