When William James, at the beginning of his 1901 Gifford Lectures, The Varieties of Religious Experience, referred to Edinburgh as “sacred to the American imagination” and went on to pay tribute to its philosophical traditions, he was indulging in something much more than the customary academic pleasantries which every visiting lecturer feels obliged to make. Sir William Hamilton's lectures, he said, “were the first philosophic writings I ever forced myself to study, and after that I was inmersed in Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown. Such juvenile emotions of reverence never get outgrown.”