Besides this medal, he obtained the first place in the Greek class.  In Logic he stood third, and he carried off a number of other prizes.  He had been in every way the better for the interruption in his course; his powers had matured, he knew what he could do, and he was able to do it at will, and from this point onward he was recognised as easily the first man of his time in the University.  But he had now to look about him for employment in the vacation; and for a while, in spite of the successes of the past session, he was unable to find it, and was glad to take some poorly paid elementary teaching.  But at length, by the good offices of one of the masters in the Edinburgh Academy, backed by the strong recommendation of Professor Pillans, he became tutor in the family of Mr. John Donaldson, W.S., of whose house, 124 Princes Street, he became an inmate.  “What I want,” said Mr. Donaldson to the professor, “is a gentleman.”  “Well,” replied Pillans, “I am sending you first-rate raw material; we shall see what you will make of it.”  He retained this situation till the close of his University course, to the entire satisfaction of his employer and his family, and with great comfort to himself—­the salary being more than sufficient for his simple needs.

He had, as we have seen, attended the class of Logic during his second session; but as he was then devoting his main strength to classics, and as the subject was as yet quite unfamiliar to him, he did not fully give himself up to it nor yield to the influence of the professor, Sir William Hamilton.  But during the summer, while he was at Mr. Donaldson’s, in going again over the ground that he had traversed during the past session, he was led to read the works of Descartes, Bacon, and Leibnitz, with the result that mental philosophy at once became the supreme interest of his academic life, and, when the winter came round again, he yielded entirely to its spell and to that of the great man who was then its most distinguished British exponent.

The class of Hamilton’s that he attended in the session of 1838-39 was that of Advanced Metaphysics.  It so happened that at that time a hot controversy was going on about this very class.  The Edinburgh Town Council, who were the patrons of Hamilton’s chair, claimed also the right to decide as to what subjects the professor should lecture on, and pronounced Metaphysics to be “an abstruse subject, not generally considered as of any great or permanent utility.”  But, while this controversy was raging without, within all was calm.  “We were quietly engaged”—­wrote Cairns twenty years later—­“in our discussions as to the existence of the external world while the storm was raging without, and only felt it to be another form of the non-ego; while the contrast between the singular gentleness and simplicity of our teacher in his dealings with his pupils, and his more impassioned qualities in controversy, became more remarkable."[1] Hamilton’s philosophy may