Glasgow he served on the court as well as on the senatus, and took a leading part in the early stages of the movement which afterwards resulted in substituting a three-term system for the unbroken session of the Scottish universities. He was also a keen politician, and gave active support to the advanced liberal party.
Adamson's literary activity, which was unusually great in youthful manhood, afterwards diminished, largely owing to the demands of lecturing work and academic business, and partly at any rate to a gradual change in his philosophical views. But his lectures to his students gave the results of his original thinking. The stand-point adopted in his earlier work was idealistic, and akin to the prevalent neo-Hegelianism. But he found increasing difficulties in working out a coherent interpretation of reality on these lines, and in adapting to such an interpretation the knowledge of nature, mind and history arrived at by modern science. In his later thinking his attitude to idealism changed, and he aimed at a constructive philosophy from a point of view which he did not refuse to describe as naturalism or realism. By this term, however, he did not mean that the external mechanism of things in space and time was equivalent to the sum-total of reality, but rather that truth in philosophy is to be reached by turning from abstract conceptions to concrete experience. Mind has indeed come into being, but it is not, on that account, less essential than, or inferior to, nature; each is a partial manifestation of reality. An outline of a theory of knowledge on these lines is given in the concluding part of his posthumously published lectures on 'Modern Philosophy'; but this theory was never worked out by him in detail, nor subjected to the same thorough criticism as idealistic philosophies received at his hands. Both in his earlier and in his later period his own views are developed by means of a critical study of the history of thought. Following the biological analogy of 'recapitulation' he found in the history of philosophy a treatment, only more elaborate and leisurely, of the same questions as those which face the individual inquirer. In general his work is distinguished by extensive and exact learning, by keen perception of the essential points in a problem, by great power of clear and sustained reasoning, by complete impartiality, and by rigid exclusion of metaphor and the imaginative factor.
In addition to articles in the 'Encyclopædia Britannica,' the 'Dictionary of National Biography,' 'Mind,' and elsewhere, Adamson was author of the following works:
- 'Roger Bacon: the philosophy of science in the middle ages (an introductory address),' Manchester, 1876.
- 'On the Philosophy of Kant' (Shaw Fellowship Lectures, 1879), Edinburgh, 1879 (translated into German by Professor C. Schaarschmidt, 'unter Mitwirkung des Verfassers,' Leipzig, 1880).
- 'Fichte' (Philosophical Classics for English Readers), Edinburgh, 1881.
After his death there appeared:
- 'The Development of Modern Philosophy, with other Lectures and Essays,' ed. by W. R. Sorley, 2 vols., Edinburgh, 1903 (with complete bibliography).
- 'The Development of Greek Philosophy,' ed. by W. R. Sorley and R. P. Hardie, Edinburgh, 1908.
- 'A Short History of Logic,' ed. by W. R. Sorley, Edinburgh, 1911.
A medallion of Adamson, executed in 1903 by Mr. Gilbert Bayes, was presented by old students and other friends to the University of Glasgow in February 1904. Later in the same year, a replica of this medallion was presented by another body of subscribers to the University of Manchester, and the Adamson Lecture there was founded in his memory; at the same time his philosophical books, numbering about 4387 volumes, were presented to the Manchester University by Mrs. Adamson (see Manchester Guardian, 4 June 1904).
[Memorial introduction prefixed to Development of Modern Philosophy, 1903; Prof. (Sir) Henry Jones in Mind, July 1902; private information. For an account of his philosophy see Prof. G. Dawes Hicks, in Mind, January 1904, and Ueberweg-Heinze, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, 10th edit. 1909, part iv. pp. 535-7.]
ADDERLEY, Sir CHARLES BOWYER, first Baron Norton (1814–1905), statesman, born at Knighton House, Leicestershire, on 2 Aug. 1814, was eldest son of Charles Clement Adderley (1780-1818) by his wife Anna Maria (d. 1827), daughter of Sir Edmund Burney Cradock-Hartopp, first baronet, a descendant of Oliver Cromwell. On the death without issue of his great-uncle, Charles Bowyer Adderley of Hams Hall, Warwickshire, on 12 April 1826, Charles succeeded to the great family estates round Birmingham, and in Warwickshire and Staffordshire. Thereupon he was taken from school at Redland near Bristol, and placed under a clerical tutor of low church views, who deepened the evangelical convictions with which his parents had
