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, in accordance with custom, I begin this Inaugural Lecture by commemorating my predecessor, I am only too well aware that no words of mine can be adequate to the subject. By all who came within the wide and powerful sweep of his influence, the late Wykeham Professor of Logic, John Cook Wilson, was recognized as one of the great forces in the spiritual life of Oxford; and though he has bequeathed to us the enduring memory of a noble example, we cannot but feel his death as an irreparable loss.

It is natural to think of him primarily as the incomparable teacher who, throughout his long career, first as tutor and then as professor, devoted himself, with unflinching energy and with remarkable success, to one of the most difficult tasks in the world the task of communicating to others his own high sense of the seriousness of philosophy, of fostering in them his own single-hearted devotion to the truth. That this was the aim and spirit of his teaching, all who knew him will agree. 'His outstanding characteristic', writes one of his pupils, 'was his power of going to the root of a matter';