Ferguson

Ferguson, ADAM, a Scottish philosopher and historian, was born June 20, 1723, at Logierait, in Perthshire, of which parish his father was minister. He studied at the universities of St Andrews and Edinburgh, and was appointed in 1745 for his knowledge of Gaelic chaplain to the famous Black Watch, in which capacity he was present at the battle of Fontenoy, and is said to have charged the enemy sword in hand among the foremost. In 1757 he succeeded David Hume as keeper of the Advocates' Library in Edinburgh, and was next appointed professor in the Edinburgh University, first of Natural Philosophy (1759), and subsequently (1764) of Moral Philosophy—a subject much more to his mind. While holding this office he accompanied the young Earl of Chesterfield (1774) on his travels on the Continent, and acted as secretary to the commission sent out by Lord North to try to arrange the disputes between the North American colonies and the mother-country (1778–79). The state of his health compelled him in 1785 to resign his professorship, in which he was succeeded by Dugald Stewart, who had previously been his deputy; but he was appointed to Dugald Stewart's own chair of Mathematics, and allowed to discharge its duties through Playfair. He next travelled on the Continent, and after his return lived a while at Neidpath Castle in Tweeddale, then farmed fourteen years at Hallyards in the vicinity. His last years he spent at St Andrews, where he died 22d February 1816. Ferguson gave up at fifty the convivialities of his time, and reaped the benefit in the unusual health and mental vigour he enjoyed to the last. Scott and Lord Cockburn have left graphic descriptions of the fine old man that reveal a love for his own virtues no less than mere admiration for a monument of the past. It was in his house that the boy Scott had his one memorable glimpse of Burns. Ferguson's writings are his Essay on Civil Society (1766), Institutes of Moral Philosophy (1772), History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic (1782), and Principles of Moral and Political Science (1792). His History of the Roman Republic was long a standard authority on its subject, was translated into both French and German, and was recommended by Carlyle in his rectorial address at Edinburgh as 'particularly well worth reading.' See Memoir by John Small (1864).