He was the only son of the three children of Very Rev Dr George Ritchie, D.D., minister of the parish and a man of scholarship and culture, who was elected to the office of Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1870.

Not allowed to make friends with other boys of his own age, he never learned to play games, and lived a solitary life, concentrating his mind on purely intellectual subjects.

At Oxford Ritchie came under the influence of Thomas Hill Green and Arnold Toynbee, and it was there that the foundations were laid both for his interest in idealistic philosophy associated with the name of G. W. F. Hegel (see British idealism), and also of his strong bent toward practical politics; his political philosophy was dominated by the belief that practical action must be derived from principles.

At this time the university was in the midst of a turmoil of conflicting interests which involved litigation and much partisan feeling.

Ritchie was a founding member, and the third President (1898–1899), of the Aristotelian Society, an influential academic organisation that is still very much in active existence.

[1] He is buried in the north-east corner of the Eastern Cemetery in St Andrews beneath a large black granite cross.

He considered that the ultimate value of religion depended on the ideal it set before mankind when it represented its highest form.

He disagreed with Henry Stephens Salt's views and authored the paper "The Rights of Animals" for the International Journal of Ethics, in 1900.