The professor of moral
philosophy, Mr. Ferrier, was a famous metaphysician and scholar. His
lectures on "The History of Greek Philosophy" were an admirable
introduction to the subject, afterwards pursued, in the original
authorities, at Oxford. Mr. Ferrier was an exponent of other men's ideas
so fair and persuasive that, in each new school, we thought we had
discovered the secret. We were physicists with Thales and that
pre-Socratic "company of gallant gentlemen" for whom Sydney Smith
confessed his lack of admiration. We were now Empedocleans, now
believers in Heraclitus, now in Socrates, now in Plato, now in Aristotle.
In each lecture our professor set up a new master and gently
disintegrated him in the next. "Amurath to Amurath succeeds," as Mr. T.
H. Green used to say at Oxford. He himself became an Amurath, a sultan
of thought, even before his apotheosis as the guide of that bewildered
clergyman, Mr. Robert Elsmere. At Oxford, when one went there, one found
Mr. Green already in the position of a leader of thought, and of young
men. He was a tutor of Balliol, and lectured on Aristotle, and of him
eager youth said, in the words of Omar Khayyam, "_He knows_! _he knows_!"
What was it that Mr. Green knew? Where was the secret? To a mind
already sceptical about masters, it seemed that the secret (apart from
the tutor's noble simplicity and rare elevation of character) was a knack
of translating St.
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