Alexander Campbell Fraser

He was born in the manse at Ardchattan, Argyll, the son of the parish minister, Rev Hugh Fraser, and his wife, Maria Helen Campbell.

He edited the North British Review from 1850 to 1857, and in 1856, having previously been a Free Church of Scotland minister, he succeeded Sir William Hamilton as professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh University.

It was about this time also that he began his study of Berkeley and Coleridge, and deserted his early phenomenalism for the conception of a spiritual will as the universal cause.

In the Biographia this "Theistic faith" appears in its full development (see the concluding chapter), and is especially important as perhaps the nearest approach to Kantian ethics made by original English philosophy.

Apart from the philosophical interest of the Biographia, the work contains valuable pictures of the Lam of Lorne and Argyllshire society in the early 19th century, of university life in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and a history of the North British Review.

After a childhood spent in an austerity which stigmatised as unholy even the novels of Sir Walter Scott, he began his college career at the age of fourteen at a time when Christopher North and Dr Ritchie were lecturing on Moral Philosophy and Logic.

[7] Fraser is buried in the small northern cemetery at Lasswade with his wife, Jemima Gordon (1819–1907), against the north boundary.