" In his lecture-room utterances,
there was an undue preponderance of rhetoric, declamation, and sentiment
over logic, analysis, and philosophy. Yet he once said of himself, that
he was "thoroughly logical and argumentative; not a rhetorician, as
fools aver." Whether this estimate was right or wrong in the main may be
a matter of question: we think it wrong. His genius, in our view, lay
rather in pictorial passion than in ratiocination. At all events, as
a teacher of philosophy, it appears to us that his conception of the
duties of his office, and his style of teaching, were far inferior to
those of his competitor and subsequent associate, Sir William Hamilton.
The one taught like a trumpet-tongued poet, and the other like an
encyclopaedic philosopher. The personal magnetism of the former led
captive the feelings, while the sober arguments of the latter laid siege
to the understanding. The great fact which impressed Wilson's students
was his overpowering oratory, and not his particular theory, or his
train of reasoning. One of them compares the nature of his eloquence
with that of the leading orators of his day, and thinks that in absolute
power over the hearers it was greater than that of any other.
The matter, too, as well as the manner of the lectures, receives
commendation at the hands of this enthusiastic disciple. He says,--"It
was something to have seen Professor Wilson,--this all confessed; but
it was something also, and more than is generally understood, to have
studied under him.
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