31 - W. E. JOHNSON

Summary

Mr William Ernest Johnson, Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, who died on Wednesday, at the age of 72, played for a great many years a leading part in the teaching of moral science in the University, especially logic and psychology, both as a lecturer and in individual teaching, and had been Sidgwick lecturer for the last 30 years.

His critical intellect did not readily lend itself to authorship. Apart from many articles in Mind and an important contribution to the Economic Journal, he did not publish his main work until 1921–4, when three volumes of ‘Logic’, out of four projected, at last appeared. He had been recognised for many years as one of the acutest philosophers in Cambridge, and had an immense influence through his love of discussion and conversation on almost all Cambridge moral scientists of the last 40 years, a great number of whom were his pupils. Indeed, conversational discussion was his greatest gift; the sweetness of his disposition joined to the subtlety of his mind to make possible the half-social, half-argumentative intercourse which must always be the best means of promoting philosophy. If his influence on Cambridge thought is to be summed up briefly, it may be said that he was the first to exercise the epistemic side of logic, the links between logic and the psychology of thought. In a school of thought whose natural leanings were towards formal logic, he was exceptionally well equipped to write formal logic himself and to criticise everything which was being contributed to the subject along formal lines.