of him as the 'greatest statesman of the English-speaking race since the elder Pitt.' He did not take up many social causes, or excite himself over ^the daily barometrical changes in politics ; but there were principles, fundamental in their character and vital alike to his political, religious, and philosophical convictions, by which he stood all his life with firmness and steadiness, and with a complete absence of concern as to ridicule or obloquy. Having graduated B.A. in 1863, Caird remained at Oxford, teaching philosophy privately. In 1864 he was elected to an open fellowship at Merton and was appointed tutor. After lecturing and teaching there for two years, he was elected professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow on 28 May 1866. With characteristic magnanimity he had declined to stand when he heard that his friend Nichol was candidate, but Nichol with no smaller loyalty retired in his favour, and supported his candidature. There was an unexampled field of candidates, amongst them Henry Calderwood, John Cunningham, Robert Flint, Simon S. Laurie, John Campbell Shairp, and James Hutchison Stirling, of all of whom memoirs appear in this Dictionary. Caird's election was unanimous. He held the post for twenty-seven years. At the close of his introductory lecture in Nov. 1866 he said that his highest ambition had been 'to teach philosophy in a Scottish university, and above all,' he added, 'in this university to which I owe so much ; and now there is almost nothing I would not give for the assurance that I should be able to teach it well.' Twenty years afterwards, on the presentation of his portrait to the university, he struck the same note : 'If fortune had given me the power of choosing my place and work in life, I do not think I should have chosen any other than that which has fallen to me.'
Caird put all his energies into his work as professor. His classes were large, and he read with conscientious thoroughness, night by night, during the winter session, the weekly and fortnightly essays of his many pupils. The main endeavour, he said of his teaching, was to plant a few 'germinative ideas' in his pupils' minds. But at the same time he connected his ideas into a system of thought with characteristic passion for synthesis and construction. He excited the interest of his hearers by insisting 'that what was true could be reasoned,' and 'that what was reasoned must be true.' Some critics urged that he was prone to repetition in both lectures and books. But 'having laboriously worked his way to central coherent convictions he could not avoid repeating them in all their manifold applications' (Prof. McCunn). A buoyant optimism, too, which was yet allied with an active sympathy with suffering (cf. ' Optimism and Pessimism ' in Evolution of Religion), and a resolute adherence to what he called ' the speculative attitude,' enabled him thoroughly to impress and stimulate youthful thought of the best kind.
At the same time Caird interested himself in many matters outside his classroom. In the earliest years of his Glasgow professorship he advocated the higher education of women, when there was no member of the senate to support him save his brother ; but he persisted till he persuaded. Meanwhile Caird, in the phrase of Prof. Bosanquet, was 'punctuating his laborious life at almost regular intervals with philosophical treatises, any one of which by itself would have sufficed to found a philosopher's reputation.' 'A Critical Account of the Philosophy of Kant, with an historical introduction,' appeared at Glasgow in 1877, and a further volume on the same theme in 1889 (2nd edit. 1909, 2 vols.) ; in 1883 he published a monograph on Hegel (in 'Philosophical Classics for English Readers,' Edinburgh); and in 1885 'The Social Philosophy and Religion of Comte' (Glasgow). In these works Caird critically interpreted other thinkers on lines of his own. In his great volumes on Kant he sought 'to display in the very argument of the great metaphysician, who was supposed to have cut the world in two with a hatchet, an almost involuntary but continuous and inevitable regression towards objective organic unity.' Notably in his treatment of Kant as of Comte his purpose was to show that there is a centre of unity to which the mind must come back out of all differences, however varied and alien in appearance. The analysis was preliminary to reconstruction. Caird's way of criticism differed indeed from that of other- philosophical writers. It was consistently and even obtrusively constructive. He seized upon the truths contained in the authors with whom he dealt, and was only incidentally concerned with their errors, if he were concerned at all. He constrained the truths to expose their one-sidedness and abstractness, and to exhibit their need of their opposites. The like originality and continuity of thought is visible in Caird's two treatises on the philosophy of religion, 'The Evolution of Religion'
