Described as a polymath but also an eccentric and outsider,[3][4][5] he took part in many ventures related to literature, politics, the arts, and philosophy, having a broad effect particularly as an editor, translator, and activist on behalf of a reformed version of the English language.

[8][9] Charles Kay Ogden was educated at Buxton and Rossall, won a scholarship to Magdalene College, Cambridge, and commenced his undergraduate study of Classics in 1908.

[citation needed] In 1909, while still an undergraduate, Ogden co-founded the Heretics Society in Cambridge[12] which questioned traditional authorities in general and religious dogmas in particular, in the wake of the paper Prove All Things,[13] read by William Chawner, Master of Emmanuel College, a past Vice-Chancellor.

[14] The Society was nonconformist and open to women, and Jane Harrison found an audience there, publishing her inaugural talk for the Society of 7 December 1909 as the essay Heresy and Humanity (1911), an argument that warned of the dangers of group-think and implored the audience to realize that we are constantly negotiating the line between egotism and herd instinct, but that how we navigate that line matters.

Investigating the origins of the word 'heresy'; her lecture, later published in Alpha and Omega (1915), challenged many of the religious restrictions and rules of the Anglican Church and its connections with the university.

[20] Rupert Brooke addressed them on contemporary theatre, and an article based on his views of Strindberg appeared in the Cambridge Magazine in October 1913.

[citation needed] The Heretics continued as a well-known forum, with Virginia Woolf on 18 May 1924 using it to formulate a reply to criticisms from Arnold Bennett arising from her Jacob's Room (1922), in a talk Character in Fiction that was then published in The Criterion.

Ogden was studying for Part II of the Classical Tripos when offered the chance to start the magazine by Charles Granville, who ran a small but significant London publishing house, Stephen Swift & Co.

Thinking that the editorship would mean giving up first class honours, Ogden consulted Henry Jackson, who advised him not to miss the opportunity.

[28] Ogden continued to edit the magazine during World War I, when its nature changed, because rheumatic fever as a teenager had left him unfit for military service.

The magazine included literary contributions by Siegfried Sassoon, John Masefield, Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw and Arnold Bennett.

It evolved into an organ of international comment on politics and the war, supported in the background by a group of Cambridge academics including Edward Dent (who sent Sassoon's work), Theo Bartholomew and Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson.

For example, Robert Reid, 1st Earl Loreburn, used the Notes from the foreign press to advocate to the Marquess of Lansdowne in 1916 against bellicose claims and attitudes on the British side.

[33] During 1917 the Magazine came under heavy criticism, with its neutral use of foreign press extracts being called pacifism, particularly by the pro-war patriotic Fight for Right Movement headed by Francis Younghusband.

Sir Frederick Pollock, who chaired Fight for Right, wrote to The Morning Post in February 1917 charging the Magazine with pacifist propaganda, and with playing on its connection with the university as if it had official status.

[36] The parliamentary exchange had two Liberal Party politicians, William Pringle and Josiah Wedgwood, pointing out that the Magazine was the only way they could read German press comments.

Ogden adopted the Latinate title now given to the work in English, with its nod to Baruch Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, which is attributed to G. E.

It drew attention to the significs of Victoria Lady Welby of whom Ogden was a disciple[citation needed] and the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce.

In summer of that year Tales Told of Shem and Shaun had been published, an extract from the work as it then stood, and Ogden had been asked to supply an introduction.

His incunabula, manuscripts, papers of the Brougham family, and Jeremy Bentham collection were purchased by University College London in 1953 with the help of a grant from the Nuffield Foundation.