[2] As a boy, he lived with his grandparents in Alexandria, West Dunbartonshire, and when he left school at fourteen he joined his father in Glasgow.

He began with the study of Thomas Carlyle and passed on to Mill, Spencer, Arnold and other intellectual giants.

His son, Hector Copland Macpherson (1888–1956), a Church of Scotland minister, had books published on astronomy and the Covenanters and these are often mistaken for his father's.

Macpherson's son suggests that his father's "own creed was a blend of what may be called the Carlylean and the Spencerian thought, combining the moral fire of the one with the scientific orderliness and logical precision of the other.

He argued vehemently against the jingoism of Rudyard Kipling, regarding him as "a foe to civilisation" who "pandered to the innate brutality of the Anglo-Saxon race".

Paul Kruger told him that he didn't blame the Queen for the war: it was all Cecil Rhodes' fault.

His religion may be summed up in a real endeavour 'to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly' with his God.

His proposers were Rev Thomas Burns, Sir David Paulin, James Young Simpson, Alexander Gault and his son, Hector Copland Macpherson (who had been elected in 1917).