Page:The Student, Edinburgh University Magazine, New Series, Volume V., Summer Session 1891.pdf/20

 So it is with Campbell Fraser. We forget his dry, hour-long, and often tedious lectures; his wearisome battlings against all modern tendencies; his recapitula­tions of the work done yesterday, with the unfailing prefaces of the work to be done to-morrow. We remember only that he has been here for thirty-five years, that our fathers also were his pupils, and that a very well-remembered figure has vanished. A new god will reign in Olympus, and there will be other worshippers. They will not in all probability fall under the spell of Berkeley; they may scoff at that tar-water hero; they may even in their ignorance believe “that the table they see before them is an objective fact of separate and complete existence, independently of conscious mind.” How the sleepy hour from one till two has to be filled in now I cannot tell, but I know that a well-remembered voice will no longer disturb the youthful philosophers, nor will the old battle (with no quarter given) prevail against “the so-called scientists of our day.” Edinburgh students have been sadly disturbed of late. The death of Muirhead removed a name of European reputation from the Faculty of Law. Then Sellar died, and with him the old traditions that had clustered round him. And now Fraser has resigned. True, as cynics (most later students) have remarked, Logic may now be taught, and a knowledge of it be essential to a Scottish M.A.; but it may be worse taught, and its dry bones may well frighten the students to come. They will have to take notes, which we never had to do; for there were copies of them without number in circulation which our ancestors had taken before us. Psychology will scarcely be so entertaining to them as it was to us; they will never feel as we did the delightful insecurity of existence, nor suffer the doubts we suffered as to whether we existed at all.

It is well known that appearances go a long way, and I hope the new Professor will have in some degree a philosophic look. I should say that a long beard and a dreamy eye are essentials; for in Edinburgh these have been long associated with Philosophy. I may be wrong, but I am rather inclined to believe that a close­ cropped Professor would work a revolution.

Professor Fraser has of late been failing in health, and seemed to feel keenly the thinning of the ranks of his old friends. Besides this a Universities Com­-mission is sitting, and great changes are expected. May it not be most fitting after all that one who has been so long identified with the old should decline to enter on the new?

the munificence of the ancient University town, the students have been presented with a splendid Un on building, which was opened recently by a grand fête. In the evening addresses were given by the President of the Students’ Association, by the Rector of the University, and by Professor Lavisse, Secretary of the University of Paris. We give some extracts from the speech of Professor Lavisse who, it will be remembered, is head of the committee for the reception and help of Scottish students in France. The discourse is interesting in itself and also as showing the spirit of those who are helping as much as possible inter-­national and all other student movements.

After congratulating the students on having been presented with a building, a meeting-place for all students of all faculties and characters, he wished them in it joyous an useful life, and said of their joyousness no guest of last May could doubt.

He then compared the condition of things in former days, with the newer aspect they are assuming, with the growth of association among all the members of the University, an association of individualities-for if the members be all zeros, the total cannot be anything else.

The old individualism was an isolation of the individual. Professors, faculties,