# Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Fraser, Alexander Campbell

​FRASER, ALEXANDER CAMPBELL (1819-1914), philosopher, was the eldest son of the Rev. Hugh Fraser, parish minister of Ardchattan, ​Argyllshire, by his wife, Maria Helen, younger daughter of Alexander Campbell, the neighbouring laird of Barcaldine. Born at the manse of Ardchattan 3 September 1819, in the last year of the reign of George III, he was able at the end of his life to say that he had lived under six British sovereigns. At the age of fourteen he entered the university of Glasgow, but after a single session there was transferred for reasons of health to Edinburgh. There he heard Sir William Hamilton’s inaugural lecture as professor of logic and metaphysics in 1836, and later on became a member of his advanced class and attended Dr. Thomas Chalmers’s lectures on divinity in preparation for the ministry of the Church of Scotland. Scotland was at that time plunged in the ecclesiastical controversies which, in 1843, rent the church in two. When the disruption took place Fraser, following the example of his teacher and of his own father, threw in his lot with the seceders, and was ordained in 1844 as junior minister of the Free church of Cramond, a small country charge close to Edinburgh. Two years later the establishment of a chair of logic and metaphysics in the theological college of the Free Church in Edinburgh opened up to him the academic career in which he was to find his true vocation. He held this position for ten years till Hamilton’s death (1856) threw open the university professorship, to which Fraser was elected after a keen contest with James Frederick Ferrier He made a reputation from the first as a stimulating teacher, and during these years he also became known to wider circles as editor, from 1850 to 1857, of the North British Review. His own earliest contributions to philosophical literature appeared in that Review, and were collected and published in 1856 as Essays in Philosophy in connexion with his candidature for the university chair.
Fraser’s thought matured slowly, and his literary output during the next ten years amounted only to a slim volume expanding an introductory lecture—Rational Philosophy in History and System (1858)—-and four or five articles in the reviews. Two of these, however, dealing with Berkeley, led to an invitation from the Clarendon Press to edit the works of that philosopher. Fraser was fortunate enough to ‘unearth a real philosophical treasure in the shape of the commonplace book kept by Berkeley during the early years at Trinity College, Dublin, when his new theory of the material world was first shaping itself in his mind. Enriched with this and other unpublished matter, the edition of the Works in three volumes, accompanied by a volume of Life and Letters, appeared in 1871 and at once made Fraser’s name a household word wherever English philosophy is studied. A volume of Selections from Berkeley, largely used in the universities, was published in 1874, and in 1881 Fraser contributed to Blackwood’s series of philosophical classics a charming sketch of Berkeley’s life and thought in which he utilized fresh material and outlined more firmly his own philosophical position. His work on Berkeley led him back to a closer study of Locke as the fountain-head of English philosophy, and the results were given to the world in the Encyclopaedia Britannica article on Locke (1882), in a volume on Locke (1890), companion to his Berkeley, in Blackwood’s series, and finally in an elaborate edition of the Essay concerning Human Understanding with prolegomena and notes (1894).
In 1891 Fraser resigned his chair after a thirty-five years’ tenure. He had taken an active part in the business and administration of the university as dean of the faculty of arts since 1859, and as representative of the senatus in the university court from 1877; but his chief work was in the class-room, where he left behind him the reputation of a great teacher. He possessed a notable power of awakening the philosophic interest in his students. Doubts and questions were presented to them rather than solutions. The mystery of the world was emphasized, but faith in an intellectual and moral harmony was kept alive. Intellectual eagerness and reverent feeling were thus happily combined, and an unusual number of his pupils became themselves philosophical teachers and writers.
Although Fraser was seventy-two when he retired, the main harvest of his own thought was still to be garnered. His appointment (1894–1896) as Gifford lecturer on natural theology in his old university enabled him to give independent expression for the first time to the slowly matured convictions of a lifetime. He was fond of describing his position as a via media between the agnosticism which would limit man’s knowledge to the ascertained uniformities of physical science and the too daring gnosticism (as he called it by way of contrast) of Hegelian idealism, which seemed to him to claim a species of omniscience that would banish all mystery from the universe. ​Himself not without an infusion of the sceptical temperament, he insisted strongly on the element of faith which must lie at the basis of all our conclusions. Our reliance on the constancy of physical law itself rests ultimately, he insisted, on a faith in the moral trustworthiness of the universe. This species of moral trust is the only alternative to universal scepticism. Fraser’s own standpoint is, therefore, that of a theism based upon moral faith. His Gifford lectures on The Philosophy of Theism (1895–f1896) were an impressive handling of the philosophical problem from this point of view. They were followed in 1898 by a little volume on Thomas Reid [q.v.], the father of Scottish philosophy. In 1904 he published, under the title Biographia Philosophica, an interesting retrospect of his long life, in which personal reminiscence is happily combined with a meditative restatement of his philosophical results. Still later, in an article in the Hibbert Journal for January 1907 entitled characteristically Our Final Venture, and in a little volume on Berkeley and Spiritual Realism (1908), he returned to present in short compass his fundamental positions. Fraser was in his ninety-second year when he laid down his pen. He died in Edinburgh 2 December 1914, his mental faculties unimpaired to the end and his bodily senses as keen as those of a young man.
Fraser married in 1850 Jemima Gordon, daughter of Dr. William Dyce, of Fonthill and Cuttlehill, Aberdeenshire, and sister of William Dyce, R.A. [q.v.]. They had three sons and two daughters. Fraser was buried beside his wife in Lasswade churchyard, not far from Gorton House, near Hawthornden, their home after his retirement until her death in 1907. Among the many academic honours which he received were honorary degrees from the universities of Glasgow (1871), Oxford (1883), Edinburgh (1891), and Dublin (1902); in 1903 he was elected fellow of the British Academy.
[Memorial notice by A. S. Pringle-Pattison in Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. vi; article in Mind, new series, vol. xxiv; personal knowledge.]
A. S. P-P.