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 that much lay
beyond it We were still engrossed with the controversy, waged in
books which now, alas ! sell for a tenth of their former price,
about the Conditioned and the Unconditioned. We still worked at
Reid, Hamilton, and Mansel. But the attacks of Mill on the one
side, and of Ferrier and Dr. Stirling on the other, were slowly
but surely withdrawing our interest. Ferrier had pointed out a
path which seemed to lead us in the direction of Germany if we
would escape from Mill, and Stirling was urging us in the same
sense. It was not merely that Ferrier had written books. He had
died more than ten years earlier, but his personality was still a
living influence. Echoes of his words came to us through Grant and
Sellar. Outside the University men.
Blackwood and Makgill made
us feel what a power he had been. But that was not all for at
least some of us. Mrs. Ferrier had removed to Edinburgh—and I
endorse all that my sister says of her rare quality. one lived in
a house in Torphichen Street, which was the resort of those
attracted, not only by the memory of her husband, but by her own
great gifts. She was an old lady and an invalid. But though she
could not move from her chair, paralysis had not dimmed her mental
powers. She was a true daughter of { Christopher North.1 I doubt
whether I have seen her rival in quickness, her superior I never
saw. She could talk admirably to those sitting near her, and yet
follow and join in the conversation of another group at the end of
the room. She could adapt herself to everyone—to the shy and
awkward student of eighteen, who like myself was too much in awe
of her to do more unhelped than answer, and to the distinguished
men of letters who came from every quarter attracted by her
reputation for brilliance. The words of no one could be more
incisive, the words of no one were habitually more kind than hers.
She had known everybody. She forgot nobody. In those days the
relation between Literature and the Parliament House, if less
close than it had been, was more apparent than it is to-day, and
distinguished Scottish judges and advocates mingled in the
afternoon in the drawing-room, where she sat in a great arm-chair,
with such men as Sellar and Stevenson and Grant and Shairp and
Tulloch. But her personality was the supreme bond. Those days are
over, and with them has passed away much of what stimulated one to
read in the Institutes or the Philosophical Remains. But for the
historian of British philosophy Ferrier continues as a prominent
figure. He it was who first did, what Stirling and Green did again
at a stage later on make a serious appeal to thoughtful people to
follow no longer the shallow rivulets down which the teaching of
the great German thinkers had trickled to them, but to seek the
sources. If as a guide to those sources we do not look on him
to-day as adequate, we are not the less under a deep obligation to
him for having been the pioneer of later guides. What Ferrier
wrote about forty years ago has now become readily accessible, and
what has been got by going there is in process of rapid and
complete assimilation. The opinions which were in 1856 regarded by
the authorities of the Free and United Presbyterian Churches as
disqualifying Ferrier for the opportunity of influencing the mind
of the youth of Edinburgh, from the Chair of Logic and Metaphysics
in succession to on Sir William Hamilton, are regarded by the
present generation of Presbyterians as the main reliable bulwark
against the attacks of unbelievers. If one may judge by the essays
in the recent volume called Lux Mundi, the same phenomenon
displays itself among the young High Church party of England. The
Time-Spirit is fond of revenges.
But even for others than the
historians of the movement of Thought the books of Ferrier remain
attractive. There is about them a certain atmosphere in which
everything seems alive and fresh. Their author was no Dry as dust.
He was a living human being, troubled as we are troubled, and
interested in the things which interest us. He spoke to us, not
from the skies, but from among a crowd of his fellow human beings,
and we feel that he was one of ourselves. As such it is good that
a memorial of him should be placed where it may easily be seen.
R. B. Haldane.