After Smith’s brief tenure of the chair, Logic fell back for a time to its old subject-matter, but the Latin medium could not be revived. “From the time that the lectures began to be delivered in English the eyes of men were opened,” writes Jardine. It was felt that the old logic of the schools, even when perfectly understood, had little or no connection with modern thought, and none with the active business of life. The local situation, too, of the University in a great commercial city, where men had a quick perception of utility, and looked for a clear adaptation of means to ends, helped to promote reform. But dislike of Logic and Ontology was not peculiar to Smith or to Glasgow. They were discountenanced by the most popular philosopher of that age. “Had the craftiest men,” wrote Shaftesbury in his _Characteristics_, “for many ages together been employed in finding out a method to confound reason and to degrade the understandings of men, they could not perhaps have succeeded better than by the establishing of this mock science.” Hutcheson had ignored logic and avoided metaphysical problems. In his _Theory of Moral Sentiments_, Smith renounced “the abstruse syllogisms of a quibbling dialectic”; but he never made the mistake of confounding Aristotle with the Aristotelians. There is in the _Wealth of Nations_ a highly interesting digression upon the Universities, to explain how Greek conceptions of philosophy were debased in the Middle Ages, and how its ancient division into three parts was altered for another into five in most of the academies of Europe. In the ancient philosophy, whatever was taught concerning the nature either of the human mind or the deity made a part of the system of physics. Whatever reason could conclude or conjecture upon the human and the divine mind, made two chapters of “the science which pretended to give an account of the origin and revolutions of the great system of the universe.” But in the universities of Europe, “where philosophy was taught only as subservient to theology,” it was natural to dwell upon these two chapters and to make them distinct sciences. And so Metaphysics or Pneumatics were set up in opposition to Physics.