tention, and was carefully elaborated by
another disciple, Professor Thomas Spencer Baynes (1823-1887), who,
after chequering philosophy with journalism, became editor of the
_Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and a careful Shakespearian student. Yet
another disciple, and the most distinguished save one, was James
Frederick Ferrier, nephew of Susan Ferrier, to whom we owe three most
brilliant novels, who was born in 1808 and died in 1864 at St. Andrews,
where he had for nearly twenty years been Professor of Moral Philosophy,
after previously holding for a short time a History Professorship at
Edinburgh. Of this latter University Ferrier had been an alumnus, as
well as of Oxford. He edited his father-in-law Wilson's works, and was a
contributor to _Blackwood's Magazine_, but his chief book was his
_Institutes of Metaphysic_, published in 1854. Too strong a Hamiltonian
influence (not in style but in some other ways), and an attempt at an
almost Spinosian rigidity of method, have sometimes been held to have
marred Ferrier's philosophical performance; but it is certain that he
had the makings of a great metaphysician, and that he was actually no
small one.

The great merit of Hamilton was that he, in a somewhat irregular and
informal way (for, as has been said, he was ostensibly more a
commentator and critic than an independent theorist), introduced German
speculation into England after a fashion far more thorough than the
earlier but dilettante and haphazard attempts of De Quincey and
Coleridge, and contributed vastly to the lifting of the whole tone and
strain of English philosophic disputation from the slovenly commonsense
into which it had fallen. In fact, he restored metaphysics proper as a
part of English current thought; and helped (though here he was not
alone) to restore logic. His defects were, in the first place, that he
was at once too systematic and two piecemeal in theory, and worse still,
that his philosophical style was one of the very worst existing, or that
could exist. That this may have been in some degree a designed reaction
from ostentatious popularity is probable; and that it was in great part
caught from his studious frequentation of that Hercynian forest, which
takes the place of the groves of Academe in German philosophical
writing, is certain. But the hideousness of his dialect is a melancholy
fact; and it may be said to have contributed at least as much to the
decadence of his philosophical vogue as any