[3] In 1855 Mrs. Adamson was left a widow with small means, and devoted herself entirely to the education of her six children (Helen, Ann, John, David, Robert, and Laurence).

At the end of his school career he entered the University of Edinburgh at the age of fourteen, and four years later graduated with first-class honours in mental philosophy, with prizes in every department of the faculty of Arts.

[4] After a short residence at Heidelberg (1871), where he began his study of German philosophy, he returned to Edinburgh as assistant first to Henry Calderwood (1830-1897) and later to Alexander Campbell Fraser (1819-1914).

In 1903, under the title The Development of Modern Philosophy and Other Essays, his more important lectures were published with a short biographical introduction by William Ritchie Sorley (1855-1935) of Cambridge University (see Mind, xiii.

At Glasgow he was soon elected one of the representatives on the court, and to him were due in large measure the extension of the academical session and the improved equipment of the university.

He left a hypothesis to be worked out by others; this done, he would criticise with all the rigour of logic, and with a profound distrust of imagination, metaphor and the attitude known as the will-to-believe.

All processes of reasoning or judgment (i.e. all units of thought) are (i) analysable only by abstraction, and (2) are compound of deduction and induction, i.e. rational and empirical.

The "Absolute" doctrines he regarded as a mere disguise of failure, a dishonest attempt to clothe ignorance in the pretentious garb of mystery.

He represented an empiricism which, so far from refuting, was actually based on, idealism, and yet was alert to expose the fallacies of a particular idealist construction (see his essay in Ethical Democracy, edited by Stanton Coit).