system for himself. He claimed to have worked on national lines; to have started from the philosophy of his country as it was currently accepted, and to have little difficulty in proving from itself its absolute inadequacy. He felt that in his doctrine of the reality of knowledge he had found the means of solving problems hitherto dark and obscure, and he used his instruments bravely, and on the whole successfully.
The faith-philosophy which professed to know reality through the senses, when these senses were a part of the external universe, or signified taking for granted the matter in dispute, was utterly repugnant to Ferrier. The Unknowable of Sir William Hamilton was inconceivable to him, and he ever kept this theory and its errors in his mind, while developing a system of his own. It is better that a philosophic system should grow up thus, instead of coming to us from without in language hard to understand because of foreign idioms and unwonted modes of expression. To be of use, a philosophy should speak the language of the people: until it becomes identified with ordinary ways of thinking, its influence is never really great; and the Idealism of Germany has in this country always suffered from being intelligible only to the few. Therefore we hold all credit due to Ferrier for consistently refusing to adopt the phraseology of a foreign country, and setting himself, heart and soul, to find expression for his thoughts in the language of his birth.
Ferrier introduces his Lectures on Greek Philosophy, the last subject on which he undertook to write, in a manner which reminds us of Hegel's remarkable Introduction to his History of Philosophy; he begins, like Hegel, by pointing out that the study of philosophy is just
