The result was, in Adam Smith’s view, disastrous. While on the one hand, subjects requiring experiment and observation, and capable of yielding many useful discoveries, were almost entirely neglected; on the other a subject, in which “after a few very simple and obvious truths the most careful attention can discover nothing but obscurity and uncertainty, and can consequently produce nothing but subtleties and sophisms, was greatly cultivated.” Metaphysics having thus been set up in opposition to physics, the comparison between them naturally gave birth to a third, called ontology, or the science which treated of the qualities and attributes common to both. “But if subtleties and sophisms composed the greater part of the Metaphysics or Pneumatics of the schools, they composed the whole of this cobweb science of Ontology.” Holding these views, it is not surprising that Smith welcomed an escape from this chair to one which proposed as its object an inquiry of a very different nature: wherein consists the happiness and perfection of a man, considered not only as an individual, but as the member of a family, of a state, and of the great society of mankind. Here was a stepping-stone to the _Wealth of Nations_. Meanwhile he did what he could to unsettle the cobweb sciences. Of Smith as a logician, John Millar, a member of his class in 1751-2, wrote that he “saw the necessity of departing widely from the plan that had been followed by his predecessors, and of directing the attention of his pupils to studies of a more interesting and useful nature than the logic and the metaphysics of the schools.” Accordingly, says Millar, “after exhibiting a general view of the powers of the mind, and explaining so much of the ancient logic as was requisite to gratify curiosity with respect to an artificial method of reasoning which had once occupied the universal attention of the learned, he dedicated all the rest of his time to the delivery of a system of rhetoric and belles lettres.” Another of those who attended his classes at Glasgow says that even after he became Professor of Moral Philosophy he would from time to time give lectures on taste and literature, and it must have been one of these that Boswell heard in 1759. Art, the drama, and music were always favourite objects of his speculations, and doubtless the substance of his essay on the _Imitative Arts_ was delivered from time to time in the University. Millar says Smith never appeared to greater advantage than as a lecturer:—