in its keenness and directness. His metaphysical system, whatever may be thought of its compass or truth, was clear as daylight through all its depths. It professed, indeed, to afford a level line of demonstration, on which, when once one sets out, there is no pause until the whole apparent mystery of reality is reached and cleared. His abstractions and refinements were lofty and subtle, but his imagination had always a concrete embodiment for the airiest and least palpable of them. The literary and artistic faculty, to which he had given free scope in his earlier days, was now the handmaiden of his intellect, and set the most abstract of his conceptions in luminous illustrations and exquisite shapes of poetry. He retained the mastery of a style, clear, idiomatic, and brilliant, which, even when he discoursed on metaphysics,
' Caught at every turn
The colours of the sun.'
More intellectually intense than excursive, more taken with the harmony and the march of demonstration than with the requirements and the facts of real life or the teachings of experience, he sought to determine by deduction from principles of reason the essential nature of things, and of existence in its greatest generality. 'Reasoned truth' was with him the highest, the only philosophy; in his entire intellect and interests he was the type of the philosopher of the abstract and deductive school.
"When I first became acquainted with Mr Ferrier
