BY E. S. HALDANE FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES PUBLISHED BY OLIPHANT ANDERSON & FERRIER EDINBURGH AND LONDON The designs and ornaments of this volume are by Mr. Joseph Brown, and the printing from the press of Morrison & Gibb Limited, Edinburgh. 1899. JAMES FREDERICK FERRIER...

Mr. Oliphant Smeaton has asked me to write a few words of preface to this little book. If I try, it is only because I am old enough to have had the privilege of knowing some of those who were most closely associated with Ferrier. When I sat at the feet of Professor Campbell Fraser in the Metaphysics classroom at Edinburgh in 1875, Ferrier's writings were being much read by us students. The influence of Sir William Hamilton was fast crumbling in the minds of young men who felt rather than saw tha

It may be a truism, but it is none the less a fact, that it is not always he of whom the world hears most who influences most deeply the thought of the age in which he lives. The name of James Frederick Ferrier is little heard of beyond the comparatively small circle of philosophic thinkers who reverence his memory and do their best to keep it green: to others it is a name of little import—one among a multitude at a time when Scotland had many sons rising up to call her blessed, and not perhaps

In the present century in Germany we have seen a period of almost unparalleled literary glory succeeded by a time of great commercial prosperity and national enthusiasm. But when Ferrier visited that country in 1834 the era of its intellectual greatness had hardly passed away; some, at least, of its stars remained, and others had very recently ceased to be. Goethe had died just two years before, but Heine lived till many years afterwards; amongst the philosophers, though Kant and Fichte, of cour

In attempting to give some idea of philosophy as it was in Scotland in the earlier portion of the present century, we shall have to go back two hundred years or thereabout, in order to find a satisfactory basis from which to start. For philosophy, as no one realised more than Ferrier, is no arbitrary succession of systems following one upon another as their propounders might decree; it is a development in the truest and highest significance of that word. It means the gradual working out of the q

'If Ferrier's life should be written hereafter,' said one, who knew and valued him, just after his death, [7] 'let his biographer take for its motto these five words from the Faery Queen which the biographer of the Napiers has so happily chosen.' Ferrier's life was not, what it perhaps seems, looking back on its comparatively uneventful course, consistently calm and placid,—a life such as is commonly supposed to befit those who soar into lofty speculative heights, and find the 'difficult air' in

It is probably in the main a wise rule for defeated candidates to keep silence about the cause of their defeat. But every rule has its exception, and there are times in which we honour a man none the less because—contrary to the dictates of worldly wisdom—he gives voice to the sense of injustice that is rankling in his mind. Ferrier had been disappointed in 1852 in not obtaining the Chair of Moral Philosophy for which he was a candidate; but then he had not published the work which has made his

'If one were asked,' says Professor Fraser, 'for the English writings which are fitted in the most attractive way to absorb a reader of competent intelligence and imagination in the final or metaphysical question concerning the Being in which we and the world of sensible things participate, Berkeley's Dialogues , Hume's Inquiry into Human Understanding , and some of the lately published Philosophical Remains of Professor Ferrier are probably those which would best deserve to be mentioned.' It ha

The story of the so-called Coleridge plagiarism is an old one now, but it is one which roused much feeling at the time, and likewise one on which there is considerable division of opinion even in the present day. Into this controversy Ferrier plunged by writing a formidable indictment of Coleridge's position in Blackwood's Magazine for March of 1840. When Ferrier took up the cudgels the matter stood thus. In the earlier quarter of the century German Philosophy was coming, or rather had already c

The St. Andrews University has the reputation of being given to strife, and never being thoroughly at rest unless it has at least one law-plea in operation before the Court of Session in Edinburgh, or an appeal before the House of Lords in London. In a small town, and more especially in a small University town, there is of course unlimited opportunity for discussing every matter of interest, and battles are fought and won before our very doors—battles often just as interesting as those of the gr

In an old-world town like St. Andrews the stately, old-world Moral Philosophy Professor must have seemed wonderfully in his place. There are men who, good-looking in youth, become 'ordinary-looking' in later years, but Ferrier's looks were not of such a kind. To the last—of course he was not an old man when he died—he preserved the same distinguished appearance that we are told marked him out from amongst his fellows while still a youth. The tall figure, clad in old-fashioned, well-cut coat and

It used to be said that none can be counted happy until they die, and certainly the manner of a man's death often throws light upon his previous life, and enables us to judge it as we should not otherwise have been able to do. Ferrier's death was what his life had been: it was with calm courage that he looked it in the face—the same calm courage with which he faced the perhaps even greater problems of life that presented themselves. Death had no terrors to him; he had lived in the consciousness