1 Posthumously published in 1865: cf. Phelan ed. (1995)

2 Cf. B&C, ch.1 passim and esp. p.20: “As he [Smith] grew older, and the embargo on childish interventions in general talk was withdrawn, he began to apply his gifts for argument to more serious topics. The habit of free inquiry was much encouraged by his father”. So also Strahan (1917) p.235: “The one [i.e. Smith] lived as a boy within a perpetual debating society …”.

3 Ib., p.108. Black and Chrystal describe the first such use of Smith by Tait, early in 1869, where Smith was persuaded to write to the Scotsman criticisng Professor Brewster's attribution of the founding of the science of electro-magnetism to the Dane, Oersted, rather than to Faraday – a further example of Tait's chauvinism. The Hamlet allusion in Maxwell’s last letter to Tait is a reference to Oersted.

4 Cf. C107 (30.12.68): “I dined with Tait on Xmas day and had a very pleasant evening in a quiet way… I am very glad to know that Tait is not a positivist… It is a comfort to know that our leading men of Science are not all unbelievers”.

5 Cf. B&C, p.34: “Smith was probably the most brilliant pupil Bain ever had; that was indeed the professor's own expressed opinion. But it was inevitable that from the outset he should be the very reverse of a disciple. The man whom Free Presbyteries were still denouncing as an atheist could scarce find easy access to minds which had been formed in the orthodox atmosphere of a Free Church manse”.

6 D396. The letter was in response to a plea from Smith's biographers for useful information. The writer, William Keith Leask, was a literary editor and minor bellelettrist who contributed voluminous anecdotal material to Aberdeen University's magazine, Alma Mater, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The reference to “a struggling private school” is inaccurate.

7 Bain, Autobiography (1904) p.347; p.353.

8 Bain was for the abolition of the classics as a compulsory element; Smith was naturally opposed. For an account of the long drawn out struggle over curricular reform in the Scottish universities, see Davie (1961).

9 It is quite evident, however, that Bain knew William Pirie Smith. In a later letter to Robertson Smith, Bain asks to be remembered to his parents.

10 Professor A. F. Murison of University College London.

11 E.g. B&C, p.20: “… his [Smith's] father, like many country clergymen, supplemented his narrow resources (his income as a Free Church minister was less than £150) by taking private pupils whom he educated with his own children.” Cf. Withrington's paper in Essays, pp.41ff. for a detailed but inconclusive view of “The School in the Free Church Manse at Keig”.

12 Smith's letters home indicate that, by 1869, he was fully self-sufficient as a result of his monetary prizes, his fee for tutoring the junior Hebrew students, and his emolument as Tait's assistant.

13 In an earlier letter to J.S. Black (D375) Leask threatened that he would tell all in his published memoirs, but when they were published, under the title Interamna Borealis, they proved to contain no such revelations.

14 His father was a weaver on piece-work: “It was the sad experience of our family that the remuneration of piece work steadily fell from year to year…”.

15 See Bain, pp. 168-182, for a typically meticulous yet unemotional account of his struggles in both Aberdeen and London between 1844 and 1846.

16 Bain has been reckoned the founder of British psychology (cf. Boring, 1950, esp. pp.237ff. for a detailed account). Bain produced his most important psychological works in the 1850s, apart from Mind and Body ( 1872). His Logic (1870) follows J. S. Mill closely but not slavishly. In 1876, he founded the journal Mind and this highly respected journal perhaps represents his major contribution to posterity.

17 B&C, p.50.

18 Quoted in B&C, p.65 (source untraced). Smith's biographers describe this as a “rather wickedly insinuated” qualification on Bain's part, but it is entirely in character with Bain's scrupulous honesty.

19 RepBA (1871). Notices and Abstracts p.7.

20 Bain's father was a strict Calvinist and Bain himself enjoyed listening, week by week, to Dr Kidd, the most eminent Aberdeen preacher of the day, but at length found it impossible to respond to Kidd's evangelical appeals: “In consequence, I felt that my conversion was still delaying and never coming any nearer; so that, with a perfect devout temper and a believing disposition, I remained in a kind of chronic indecision as to my own state” (Bain., p.38f.).

21 Ib., p. 145f. In the same year, Bain read George Eliot's translation of D.F. Strauss's Das Leben Jesu.

22 Cf. Fletcher (1974) for a clear account of Comte's positivism.

23 Delivered before the New College Theological Society (of which Smith was Secretary) in January, 1868. The letter (D565) from the joint editor of the Contemporary Review refers to it as “your paper on Prophecy and History” and goes on: “Fully appreciating as I do the ability and depth of the paper, I yet regret to say that I do not think it suitable for our pages”.

24 C100 (to his father): “I fear there is after all little hope with the B.Q. people. I only hope they may not lose the paper”. In fact, only part of this paper (L&E, pp.97-108) is extant.

25 C129 (to his father): “My paper sent to the Academy came back today, the book being 'engaged elsewhere'. I may try some other paper but the great thing will be my longer essay”.

26 L&E, pp.3-12; originally published in TransRSE, vol.vi, pp.477-483.

27 Ib., p.3.

28 D473.

29 The word “over-done” here replaces “over-drawn”, which Bain has struck out.

30 D29 (17.04.1869).

31 C116. Quoted also in B&C, p.109. Bain's letter to Smith, however, is omitted by his biographers.

32 Ib.

33 William Whewell (1794-1866), a Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, published his two major works, the History of the Inductive Sciences and The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, in 1837 and 1840 respectively. He is best remembered today for his pioneering work in scientific nomenclature and for the fact that we owe the terms physicist and scientist (as well as a host of more technical words) to his ingenuity, enterprise and authority. Cf. Medawar (1969). It is in this latter sense that Goldman (1983) p.102, writes: “It patently required someone of Robertson Smith's erudition to do a Whewell for Quaternions …”.

34 Particularly in his Novum Organum and Advancement of Learning.

35 Novum Organum Renovatum, in Butts (1968) p.104.

36 As Butts (1968, p.17) comments: “His [Whewell's] theory of induction, in its full form, expresses what is now called the hypothetico-deductive character of well-developed science”.

37 Today, the concept of intuition, in the sense of imaginative creativity, is accorded much higher status in the inductive process: cf. Medawar (1969) pp.44-59.

38 Of Induction, with Especial reference to Mr J. Stuart Mill's System of Logic: in Butts (1968) pp.265-308.

39 Ib., p.265.

40 Ib., p.267 (Whewell's emphases).

41 Tait's semi-humorous but eminently “scientific” papers on the dynamics of golf, in Knott (1911) pp.329-349, represent perfect examples of the inductive process in all its aspects. The validity of his generalisations could be (and were) established by the successful modification (via deductive reasoning) of both ball and club face.

42 Medawar (1969) p.12: “Only a minority of scientists have received instruction in scientific methodology, and those that have done so seem no better off”.

43 Ib.

44 Mill (1963) p.121.

45 “Note on Professor Bain's Theory of Euclid 1.4” (L&E, pp.67-70; taken from TransRSE, vii, pp.176-179).

46 “Hegel and the Metaphysics of the Fluxional Calculus” (L&E, pp.13-43; and in TransRSE. xxv (2) pp.491-511).

47 WRS wrote (C157a) in July, 1869 to his mother from Göttingen: “The thing about Hegel has been printed complete but what inaccurate proof sheets! I would have preferred certainly to have rewritten the paper which is crude and certainly would not have been accepted but for Tait's good offices which would be exerted for any attack on Hegel”.

48 L&E, p.13.

49 Ib.

50 In a letter of 3.12.1869 to his father (C127) WRS remarks on a forthcoming introduction to Dr Grainger Stewart, “who is thereafter to ask me to meet Hutcheson Stirling – a very kind plan of Dr Brackenridge's arrangement”.

51 D 699 (23.12.69).

52 D611.

53L&E, p.72.

54 The Fortnightly Review began publication in 1865 under the editorship of John Morley.

55 Published in the number for April, 1873 and reprinted in L&E pp.71-93.

56 Ib., p.73. Smith had been delighted when his earlier paper against Hegel had been translated into French and was piqued when Stirling, in his latest book (prolixly entitled Lectures on the Philosophy of Law. Together with Whewell and Hegel, and Hegel and Mr W.R.Smith, a Vindication in a Physico-Mathematical Regard) had described it as “rabid nonsense, not only in English but even in French”.

57 Ib., p. 85: “Obviously there is some misunderstanding here as regards the meaning of words”.

58 Hegel had anathematized Newton's use of infinitesimals; Smith's justification of Newton is particularly trenchant and effective.

59 L&E, p.86.

60 Printers of the Fortnightly Review.

61 Postcard (no ref.) dated 12.3.73.

62 C28 (3.6.79).

63 D58a: in J.S. Black's handwriting and headed, “extract from letter of 24th June, 1879”. McLennan wrote from Lausanne to their mutual friend, Alexander Gibson, at the beginning of July (D458) commenting: “I wish myself he [WRS] were rid of the miserable connection and understood to be open to some fresh employment – more worthy of him as free to be exercised without restraints of conscience… To Smith profoundest sympathy in his trouble. I wish he wd. shake himself free of his enemies”.

64 As his letter of 5th July to Lindsay (C30) makes clear. He remarks, “If I had not found that there was a general feeling among friends… I wd. never have faced such a thing. Even as it is it is painful to me to seem untrue to my proper studies but I fear it has come to that…”.

65 D458: McLennan to Alexander Gibson (1.7.79). Similarly: “I wish myself he were free of the miserable connection and understood to be open to some fresh employment more worthy of him as free to be exercised without constraints of conscience”.

66 C31 (July, 1879).

67 Ibid. “Chrystal” refers of course to G.W. Chrystal, Smith's co-biographer with J.S. Black. Understandably, this incident is not mentioned in their brief account of WRS's unsuccessful candidacy (B&C, p.330). George Chrystal obtained the chair of Mathematics in the Department of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh in 1879/80 and collaborated closely thereafter with Tait: see Knott (1911) p.86. He also wrote the article for EB9 on “Electricity and Magnetism”. Smith seems to have been unaware how ill Maxwell was by this time.

68 D415.

69 July 26, 1879 (no ref.).