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ALEXANDER CAMPBELL FRASER,
D.C.L.
Oxford; LL.D. Princeton, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen; Litt.D.
Dublin; etc., emeritus professor of logic and metaphysics in the
University of Edinburgh, claims as his birthplace the manse of
Ardchattan in the year 1819. In that lonely and romantic spot in the
land of Lorne in Argyllshire he lived as one of a family of ten sons for
fourteen years. A youth of Celtic descent, surrounded by wild and
legend-haunted scenery, remote from the busy, hurrying world, whose
echoes only reached him mellowed by an ecclesiastical haze, he early
withdrew into himself. This self-centredness was accentuated by his weak
health, which limited his schooldays to one year and substituted
therefor the private tuition of the village schoolmaster. A temporary
indifference or even distaste for the classical languages was fostered
by a mechanical method of imparting their glories, but history proved
more congenial to his temperament, while popular astronomy was eagerly
perused, to the prejudice of his father’s orthodox Biblical instruction.
At the age of fourteen he entered the University of Glasgow, a shy, raw,
sensitive youth. “ Happily,” he says of his boyish matriculation “ the
custom is different now.”1 Even thus early he became acquainted with the
philosophy of Berkeley, the greatest influence in the formulation of his
own world-intuition (Weltanschauung), which caused a revisal of his
childish naturalism. He transferred his allegiance in 1834 to the
University of Edinburgh, which he was to adorn later as successor to
Hamilton in the chair of Logic and Metaphysics.
Alexander
Campbell Fraser
A Sketch of his Life and Philosophical position, by John Kellie, M.A..
B.D. (1909) (pdf) |
