T/WO pupils of Professor Mylne's created and sustained for a number of years a strong taste for mental science in the Irish province of Ulster, from which the founder of the Scottish philosophy bad come.These were professors in the Belfast College, which imparted a high and useful education to the young men of the north-east of Ireland for a considerable number of years, and till it gave way to Queen's College, Belfast.One of these was John Young, professor of moral philosophy, and the other William Cairns, professor of logic and belles-lettres.
John Young was the son of a seceder elder, and was born in Rutherglen in the neighborhood of Glasgow in 1781.He early showed, in the midst of business pursuits, a taste for reading of a high order, for composition, and for spouting.
He had difficulties n getting a learned education; but he taught a school, became a clerk in a bleach-field in the neighborhood, and then in a mercantile house in Glasgow; and struggled on, as many a Scotch youth has done, till in 1808, at the age of twenty-seven, he became a student in the University of Glasgow, where he distinguished himself in the classes of logic and moral philosophy, taught by Professors Jardine and Mylne, and took an active part in the college societies, where be displayed, as was thought, extraordinary eloquence.He next attended the divinity hall in the university, and, losing his faith in the stern principles of the seceders, bad his thoughts directed towards the ministry in the established church.But his destination was fixed when, in 1815, the spirited inhabitants of Belfast set up the Belfast Academical Institution, embracing a college.Mr.
Young, on the recommendation of the Glasgow professors, was appointed professor of moral philosophy.
Belfast was at that time a much smaller place than it is now, but a place of great enterprise; and among its merchants, its flax spinners, its linen manufacturers, and its ministers of religion, it had a body, if not of very refined yet of very intelligent men, many of them inclined to the Unitarian, or non-subscribing faith; and these men desired to have a good education {368} for their sons, and were proud of the pleasant, the accomplished, and public-spirited man who now came to live among them.His manners were genial; he had acquired a very varied knowledge; he was a ready and instructive talker and an eloquent speaker.The consequence was that he became a favorite in the best society of the place, and, it is to be added, spent too much of his time in dining out, and in entertaining the citizens by his humor and his sparkling conversation.
But he was an able and a most successful teacher, expounding his views with great clearness and fire, and creating a taste for the study, even among the mercantile classes, but especially among the ministers of religion, subscribing and non-subscribing, in Ulster.His lectures were at first carefully written out; but, as years rolled on, he became less dependent on his papers, and expanded like a flood on his favorite topics, and had difficulty in compressing his superabundant matter in the limited course allowed him.He collected for the college a vast number of books published from the time of Locke down to his own day in mental philosophy: these were subsequently bought by the Queen's College.He continued a popular and useful member of society and of his college down to his death, March 9,1829.