In Ferrier's view, a serious crisis had been arrived at in the history of the University of Edinburgh, and one which might lead to yet further evil were not something done to place matters on a better footing. Had the Town Council, the electing body, been affected simply by personal or sectarian feelings, it would not so much have mattered; but when Ferrier was forced to the conclusion that what they did must end in the curtailment of all liberty in regard to philosophical opinion, so far as the University was concerned, he felt the time had come to speak. For a quarter of a century he had devoted the best part of his life and energies to the study of philosophy, and he held he had a duty to discharge to it as one of the public instructors of the land. What cause, he asked, had a body like the Council to say originality was to be proscribed and independence utterly forbidden? Through their liberalism tests had been practically abolished: was another test, far more exacting than the last, to be substituted in their place? A candidate for a philosopher's chair need not be a believer in Christ or a member of the Established Church; but he must, it would appear, believe in Dr. Reid and the Hamiltonian system of philosophy. The 'common-sense' school, against which Ferrier's attacks were mainly directed, too often found its satisfaction in commonplace statements of obvious facts, and we cannot wonder that Ferrier should ask why Scottish students should be required to pay for 'bottled air' while the whole atmosphere is 'floating with liquid balm that could be had for nothing?'--a question, indeed, which cannot fail to strike whoever tries to wade through certain tedious dissertations of the time, all expressing truths which seem incontrovertible in their nature, but all of which are also inexpressibly uninteresting. Philosophy to Ferrier is not the elementary science that it would appear from these discourses: loose ways of thinking which we ordinarily adopt must, he considers, be rectified and not confirmed. And yet he disclaims the accusation that he has conjured with 'the portentous name of Hegel,' or derived his system from German soil. Hegel, he constantly confesses, is frequently to him inexplicable, and his system is Scottish to the core. A warm debt of gratitude to Hamilton, Ferrier, it is true, acknowledges even while he differs from his views--a debt to one whose 'soul could travel on eagles' wings,' and from whom he had learned so much--whom, indeed, he had loved so warmly. Hamilton had not agreed with Ferrier; he had thought him wrong, and told him so, and Ferrier was the last to resent this action, or think the less of him for not recanting at his word the conclusions of a lifetime's labour. Provocation, the younger man acknowledges, he had often given him, and 'never was such rough provocation retaliated with such gentle spleen.'