Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/583

Rh efforts, have enabled me to approach, as I think, the pinnacles of truth.

Morally and intellectually, Sir William Hamilton was among the greatest of the great. A simpler and a grander nature never arose out of darkness into human life: a truer and a manlier character God never made. How plain, and yet how polished was his life, in all its ways; how refined, yet how robust and broad his intelligence, in all its workings. Without a boast, I may say that I knew him better than any other man ever did. For years together scarcely a day passed in which I was not in his company for hours, and never on this earth may I expect to live such happy hours again. To his last moment he preserved a temper indomitable under the disablement with which, for many years, he had so heroically striven; but in those days, when his body was unbroken and his mind untamed, by disease, how widely and how freely his energies expatiated over all the gardens of speculation! how he hailed with welcome every fresh suggestion, giving back ten times more than he received! These are memories I love to cherish. I have learnt more from him than from all other philosophers put together; more, both as regards what I assented to and what I dissented from. His contributions to philosophy have been great; but the man himself was greater far. I have studied both. I approve of much in the one; in the other I approve of all. He was a giant in every field