process of education. No one was ever more gifted with this rare endowment than Professor Ferrier. There was a buoyant and graceful charm in all he did, a perfect sympathy, cordiality, and frankness, which won the hearts of his students, as of all who sought his intellectual companionship. Maintaining the dignity of his position with easy indifference, he could condescend to the most free and affectionate intercourse; make his students, as it were, parties with him in his discussions, and while guiding them with a master-hand, awaken at the same time their own activities of thought as fellow-workers with himself. There was nothing, I am sure, more valuable in his teaching than this, nothing for which his students will longer remember it with gratitude. No man could be more free from the small vanity of making disciples. He loved speculation too dearly for itself, he prized too highly the sacred rights of reason, to wish any man or any student merely to adopt his system or repeat his thought. Not to manufacture thought for others, but to excite thought in others, to stimulate the powers of inquiry, and brace all the higher functions of the intellect, was his great aim. He might be comparatively careless, therefore, of small processes of drilling and minute labours of correction. These, indeed, he greatly valued in their own place. But he felt that his strength lay in a different direction, in the intellectual impulse which his own thinking, in its life, its richness, and clear open candour, was capable of imparting.
