Throughout E. T. Bell’s writings on mathematics, both those aimed at other mathematicians and those for a popular audience, we find him endeavouring to promote abstract algebra generally, and the postulational method in particular. Bell evidently felt that the adoption of the latter approach to algebra (a process that he termed the ‘arithmetization of algebra’) would lend the subject something akin to the level of rigour that analysis had achieved in the nineteenth century. However, despite p...