Himself not without an infusion of the sceptical temperament, he insisted strongly on the element of faith which must lie at the basis of all our conclusions. Our reliance on the constancy of physical law itself rests ultimately, he insisted, on a faith in the moral trustworthiness of the universe. This species of moral trust is the only alternative to universal scepticism. Fraser’s own standpoint is, therefore, that of a theism based upon moral faith. His Gifford lectures on The Philosophy of Theism (1895–f1896) were an impressive handling of the philosophical problem from this point of view. They were followed in 1898 by a little volume on Thomas Reid [q.v.], the father of Scottish philosophy. In 1904 he published, under the title Biographia Philosophica, an interesting retrospect of his long life, in which personal reminiscence is happily combined with a meditative restatement of his philosophical results. Still later, in an article in the Hibbert Journal for January 1907 entitled characteristically Our Final Venture, and in a little volume on Berkeley and Spiritual Realism (1908), he returned to present in short compass his fundamental positions. Fraser was in his ninety-second year when he laid down his pen. He died in Edinburgh 2 December 1914, his mental faculties unimpaired to the end and his bodily senses as keen as those of a young man.
Fraser married in 1850 Jemima Gordon, daughter of Dr. William Dyce, of Fonthill and Cuttlehill, Aberdeenshire, and sister of William Dyce, R.A. [q.v.]. They had three sons and two daughters. Fraser was buried beside his wife in Lasswade churchyard, not far from Gorton House, near Hawthornden, their home after his retirement until her death in 1907. Among the many academic honours which he received were honorary degrees from the universities of Glasgow (1871), Oxford (1883), Edinburgh (1891), and Dublin (1902); in 1903 he was elected fellow of the British Academy.
[Memorial notice by A. S. Pringle-Pattison in Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. vi; article in Mind, new series, vol. xxiv; personal knowledge.]
FRASER, Sir ANDREW HENDERSON LEITH (1848-1919), Indian civil servant, was born at Bombay 14 November 1848, the grandson of an unsuccessful claimant to the Lovat peerage, and the eldest son of the Rev. Alexander Garden Fraser, D.D., Presbyterian missionary, by his wife, Joanna Maria, daughter of the Rev. John Shaw, a minister in Skye who came of a family of Dalnaglar, Glenshee, Perthshire. After a brilliant career at Edinburgh Academy and University, Fraser passed the open examination for the Indian civil service in 1869, and was posted two years later to the Central Provinces, where he served for the next twenty-seven years, holding almost every local executive post of distinction. He was also a member of the hemp-drugs commission (1893–1894). In 1898 he was about to retire after a prominent but not exceptional career, when his ready pen and his gifts as a public speaker attracted the notice of the viceroy, Lord Curzon, who appointed him first to officiate as secretary in the home department and shortly afterwards as chief commissioner of the Central Provinces. Three years later he was selected to be president of the commission on the Indian police; and in November 1903 Lord Curzon promoted him to the lieutenant-governorship of Bengal, having kept that great office without a permanent incumbent for more than a year in order that Fraser might fill it without being prematurely taken away from the commission. He received the K.C.S.I. on appointment.
More than three-quarters of Fraser’s Indian service was spent in the Central Provinces before their union with Berar (1903) and the industrial development of subsequent years had transformed that administration. Under the conditions then prevailing, though he sometimes laid himself open to the criticism of giving his confidence too freely, he undoubtedly acquired a very close first-hand knowledge of Indian village life and of the problems of district administration, a knowledge which was turned to account in the invaluable reforms which his commission was able to propose in the police systems of India. No branch of government touches more intimately the lives of the people; and the improvement in the efficiency and honesty of the police is Fraser’s most substantial claim to remembrance.
No part of India, however, was more different from the Central Provinces than Bengal, where in 1903 the lieutenant-governor ruled, single-handed and with an inadequate and inelastic revenue, a population of over eighty millions. Fraser’s personal charm was at a discount in a province so large that none but a minority even of his own officers could be in direct contact with him; and his
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