S/IR W/ILLIAM H/AMILTON says that Gershom Carmichael "may be regarded, on good grounds, as the real founder of the Scottish school of philosophy." ("Reid's Works," P.30.)I am disposed to retain the honor for Francis Hutcheson, to whom it is usually ascribed.Carmichael does not possess the full characteristics of the school.He seems to me to be the bond which connects the old philosophy with the new in Scotland.
He was descended from a genuine covenanting stock.His father was Alexander Carmichael, the son of Frederick Carmichael, who had been minister in various places in Fifeshire, and who died in 1667; his mother was relict (she had been the second wife) of Fraser of Bray.Alexander was minister at Pittenain, and had at one time been attached to prelacy, but abandoned it to join the suffering ministers.
Early in 1672, he is in the tolbooth of Edinburgh.On February 22, he is before the Council, charged with keeping conventicles, and is ordered to depart the kingdom, never to return without license; and February 26, he is transported in a ship to London, where {37} he was useful as a minister, and died about the year 1676 or 1677.In 1677, shortly after his death, there was published, from the copy which he had left, a treatise, entitled, "The Believer's Mortification of Sin by the Spirit," edited by Thomas Lye, who says in the preface, "As for that flesh of his flesh, and the fruit of his loins, as for that Ruth and Gershom he hath left behind him, I question not but as long as the saints among you continue to bear your old name, Philadelphia (so the old Puritans of England have used to style you), you will not, you cannot, forget to show kindness to Mephibosheth for Jonathan's sake." Gershom, so called by his father because he was "a stranger in a strange land," seems to have been born in London about 1672.It may be supposed that the family returned to Scotland after the father's death.We certainly find Gershom enrolled a Master of Arts in the University of Edinburgh, July 31, 1691.He afterwards became Regent at St.Andrews, where he took the oath of allegiance, and subscribed the Assurance.On November 22, 1694, he is elected and admitted Master in the University of Glasgow, having been brought in by public dispute, that is, by disputation on comparative trial, through the influence of Lord Carmichael, afterwards the first Earl of Hyndford.
About the same time he lost his mother, and "married a good woman, the daughter of Mr.John Inglis." Wodrow, who tells us this (" Letters "), was his pupil, and describes him as at that time possessed of little reading, as dictating several sheets of peripatetic physics <de materia prima>, as teaching Rohault, and being very much a Cartesian, -- this seven years after the publication of Newton's " Principia."Afterwards he made himself master of the mathematics and the new philosophy, and Wodrow used to jest with him on this matter of his juvenile teaching.From these notices it appears that, by parentage and birth and training and ancestral prepossessions, he belongs to the seventeenth, but catches the spirit of the eighteenth century.He exhibits in his own personal history the transition from the old to the new thought of Scotland.
He is represented as a hard student, a thinking, poring man, his favorite study being moral philosophy.At the commencement of his professorial life, a Master took up the batch of students as they entered on the study of philosophy, and carried {38} them in successive years through all the branches, including logic, pneumatology, moral philosophy, and natural philosophy.This system required the teacher to be a well-informed man in various departments, but was a hindrance to eminence in any one branch of learning.But from 1727 the Masters are restricted to their several classes, and to Carmichael is consigned moral philosophy.It appears that, in 1726, there were thirty-six students in the third year's class, and nineteen in that of the fourth year; in the latter days of Carmichael the numbers were larger.The classes were swelled by non-conforming students from England, who, shut out from the English universities by their tests and their churchified influence, betook themselves to the Scottish colleges.Many of these were attracted to Glasgow by the fame of Carmichael.The college session lasted from the beginning of November to the end of May.On the Lord's day, the Masters met with their classes, to take an account of the sermons, and this was a work in which Carmichael felt a special interest.