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