All these considerations evidently lead to the conclusion that Mr Martineau is the most eligible candidate. He appears to be at least equal to the other candidates in ability and learning, while he is superior to them both in reputation, and in experience and success as a teacher.

Upon the strength of this singularly strong testimony we have no hesitation in concluding that Mr Croom Robertson is exceedingly well qualified to fill the vacant chair; and that of the candidates whose claims we have examined up to this point, he is the ablest, and, as far as we can judge, the most learned, and the most likely to rise to eminence, and to raise the reputation of the College. But there yet remains upon the list the name of Mr James Martineau. As the Senate has already recommended the appointment of Mr Martineau, and the Council has declined to appoint him, the Senate does not think it necessary to present a second report concerning him.

To the Chairman of the Council of University College.

91 Adelaide Road, November 10, 1860.

Sir, - I feel much sorrow in notifying to the Council that my connection with the College must close at the end of the current session.

For some years the returns of my chair have been so small that, taking into account the time I give, my stay has been an imprudence. I had nevertheless calculated that I might, without too great an injustice to my family, draw upon my capital, if I may use so grand a word, for the means of retaining my post during this and the next session, in the hope of the dawn of better days.

The recent vote of the Council in the case of Mr Martineau renders it unnecessary for me to settle when I shall leave the College; it proves that the College has left me. I am, as heretofore, strong in the determination not to be overlooked, and not to be controlled in any matter of religious thought, speech, or teaching. The Council has decided that a certain amount of notoriety for advocacy of an unpopular theology is a disqualification. Whether a distinction was intended between the case of a candidate and of an installed Professor I neither know nor care. I assume that such a body as the Council would never entertain this distinction. I concede that A is not B, but I maintain that those who surrender to expediency point A of principle are the men who will surrender point B when the time comes, and who, until that time does come, will be honestly shocked at the prophecy of their future conduct. Adherence to come is discounted to meet the consequence of present departure. The principle of the College has been partially surrendered to expediency; no man can say how much more will be given up, nor when. This I said when the Peene legacy was accepted, and I was laughed at. The acceptance of the conditions of that legacy did not drive me from the College, because, after much deliberation, and not a little help from what I now see to be sophism, my love for the College and the life I led in it barred the way with De minimis non curat lex. But I ought to have seen that minimum is the first step from nihil to totum; and when St Denys, with his head under his arm, had made that first step, I ought to have foreseen the second. My self-complacency is comforted by observing that there are even now men of experience and thought who not only cannot foresee the third step, but who affirm it will never be made.

Before proceeding to the most delicate part of the subject I make two remarks. First, in all that I say I am stating the decision of my own court, by which my own course is determined. It is for me alone to weigh evidence, and for me alone to decide. This distinction is often forgotten; such a letter as the present is treated as appeal to those to whom it is addressed, instead of recorded argument in a decided case. Be it remembered that the first sentence of this letter contains the needful; all the rest is partly respect to the body I am addressing, partly evidence of what is thought by a person who has stood by the College for thirty years, and who is likely to represent the opinions of many.

Secondly, I earnestly protest against being supposed to impute to any one, in or out of the Council, the least wilful or conscious impropriety of reasoning or conduct. I mean to give the offence which, in our thin-skinned day, is always taken at plain and uncompromising attack upon alleged wrong proceedings; but I am free of all intention to be personally disrespectful to any of the promoters. I can never forget the cordial co-operation of thirty years. In the matter of Mr Martineau, I am aware of the existence of two cross currents. Since the first vote of the Council I have weighed all that I heard, and have for months been satisfied that there has been an objection to his psychology as well as to his religion: the first is too far removed from atheism to please the philosopher, the second too far removed from orthodoxy to please the priest. No longer neutral between the disputes of Christians, the College is to apply the abandoned principle in another field. The frontier is to be rectified by putting Theism in the place of Unitarianism, and making God an open question, not to be the basis of any teaching on the human mind. And so it is contrived that one and the same victim, offered on the altar of the Janus Bifrons of expediency, shall appease both the priest and the philosopher, while each votary selects the particular head of the deity to which his offering is made.

I proceed to show that (supposing me willing to remain) I am as worthy to be extruded as Mr Martineau to be excluded.

I have for thirty years, and in my class-room, acted on the principle that positive theism may be made the basis of psychological explanation without violation of any law of the College. When in elucidating mathematical principles it is necessary to speak of our mental organisation as effect of a cause, I have always referred it to an intelligent and disposing Creator. The nature of things, the eternal laws of thought, and all the ways by which that Creator is put in the dark corner, have been treated by my silence as philosophical absurdities not worthy to have their silly names intruded upon those who are to be trained to think. Were I to remain under the new system, I should hold it a sacred duty and - ah, poor human nature! - a malicious pleasure to extend and intensify all I have hitherto said on this subject.

Again, for more than thirty years I have been as strong a Unitarian as Mr Martineau. If I have not raised my voice in this matter, and as strongly as Mr Martineau has done, it is because I have been deeply engaged in other things, because I do not care what un-reflecting people think they think, and because I have found that the great bulk of reflecting men of all sects keep their Trinitarianism caged in a creed, and are, in every practical application of religion except pelting Unitarians, as truly Unitarian as Mr Martineau himself. Were I to continue in this College, under even the ghost of a gag, I should soon be heard (without the walls) on a subject to which I have paid long and close attention. I should soon bring the question to issue whether the installed Professor is or is not a subject for such discussion as has arisen about the candidate for admission.

I hope it will be clear that my absence is as desirable as that of Mr Martineau. But, for reasons given, I deprecate the supposition of having sacrificed to principle. I have only ceased to sacrifice because the temple has been desecrated. My determination would not be altered by a return to the old principle on the part of the Council. I shall, therefore, not be suspected of any personal motive when I urge the Council to reconsider their suicidal vote, and to re-nail the old flag to the mast.

One point has perhaps been almost overlooked. A teacher of psychology, if he do his duty, expounds all systems of sufficient note, and puts forward the grounds of each. Every one must have his own system, and if one may therefore be suspected of bias, so must another. Mr Martineau has special reputation as an eclectic teacher. He is noted for ability to prepare students for examinations in which the examiners have no bias towards his views. I have heard it remarked, before this discussion, that he crams his pupils with different systems. Such a man does not cram. It means that those of his students who desire no better can cram different systems from his lectures. There is more proof of his competency in this respect than in the case of any of the untried candidates.

Return to the old principle. If the College fall, it will fall with honour. No concession of narrow minds, philosophical or theological, will save it. The enemy will give one sneer more, the friend nine cheers less. Thing'embigot, who says that his son shall not enter the College if Mr Martineau teach there, never meant to send his son in any case. The late vicar of St Pancras, then a lessee in Gower Street, found the noise of the playground disagreeable, and sent word that if the nuisance were not abated he should withdraw his patronage; he had been an inveterate opponent. He was left to subtract his negative quantity if he pleased. Let Thing'embigot learn the same rule of algebra.

On the other hand, the enemy of religious disqualification, if the present course be persisted in, must decide whether his son shall be educated under selection carried up to its logical extent in the professed fear of God, or exclusion nibbled at up to compulsion of circumstances in the concealed fear of man as to religion, and another fear of God as to philosophy. I should myself be puzzled to make a choice, for if there be a tincture of atheism in the second fear of God, there is a tincture of blasphemy in the first. Of the two different ways of putting man in the place of God, I think the world at large would prefer the first.

My best wishes remain with the College which I leave, but I wish to make myself clearly understood on the question which has been opened. I trust that by return to and future maintenance of the sound principle on which it was founded, in which there is more religion than in all exclusive systems put together, the College will rise into prosperity under the protection, not of the Infinite, not of the Absolute, not of the Unconditioned, not of the Nature of things, not of the chapter of accidents, but of God, the Creator and Father of all mankind. - I am, sir, with much respect,

Your obedient, humble servant,
A De Morgan.

... that your letter of November 10, addressed to the Chairman of the Council, was read at a session of the Council on Saturday last, and that your resignation of the Professorship of Mathematics from the close of the current session was accepted.

Statement addressed to the Proprietors of University College.

A certain number of Fellows and Proprietors of University College, London, have required the Council of the College to convene a Special General Meeting of the Proprietors, 'to consider a recent resolution of the Council declining to appoint the Rev James Martineau to the Professorship of Mental Philosophy and Logic, after a Report of the Senate that he was the best qualified candidate for the chair;' and a Special General Meeting will be held, in consequence of this requisition, on Saturday, February 2.

May 7, 1867.
Dear Sir, - Many of your old pupils, at whose request we address you, desire, upon your resignation oi a chair which for upwards of thirty years you have filled with so much distinction, to give some appropriate expression to the high estimation in which they hold you.

Our admiration for your philosophical views of education, your skill in the art of instruction, and your scientific attainments, as well as our cordial regard and esteem for you as our old teacher and friend, render us desirous of recording these feelings in some substantial shape.

We understand, however, that you feel you cannot consistently accept any testimonial of intrinsic value. But we hope that you may be persuaded to gratify your pupils by sitting for a picture or bust to be placed in the library of our old College. We remain, sir,

Yours faithfully,
Jacob Waley, H M Bompas, W A Case, R B Clifton, J G Greenwood, J M Solomon, G Jessel, H Cozens Hardy, Richard Holt Hutton, Theodore Waterhouse, Walter Bagehot.

My dear Waley, - I acknowledge your kind letter of the 7th with the cordial and gratifying inclosure, signed by eleven old pupils, whose dates represent the time which has elapsed since I rejoined the College in 1836.

The inclosure is in itself a testimonial. It has all the meaning and all the value. And to those who hold that the mind of the teacher counts for something in the making of the pupil, the string of names appended to it will be no mean presumption that I have in some degree a claim to the terms in which I am described.

I am asked to sit for a bust or picture, to be placed in what is described as "our old College." This location is impossible; our old College no longer exists. It was annihilated in November last.

The old College to which I was so many years attached by office, by principle, and by liking, had its being, lived, and moved in the refusal of all religious disqualifications. Life and soul are now extinct.

I will avoid detail. I may be writing to some who think that the recent transaction is a reparable dilapidation, or even to some who approve of it. To me the College is like a Rupert's drop with a little bit pinched off the small end; that is, a heap of dust.

I can never forget that I have been usefully employed, though I now wish my life had been passed in any other institution. I have worked under the conviction that I was advancing a noble cause, until every letter in the sentence "Augustus De Morgan, Professor of Mathematics in University College, London," stands for 234 hours of actual lecturing, independent of all study and preparation; and all this under a banner which is now shown to have been either shamefully raised or shamefully deserted.

So much is necessary that my old pupils may understand my mind, and the repugnance I feel towards any proceeding which must record my connection with University College. I am happy to say that the circumstances have not created any personal bitterness of feeling; individuals are to me what they were before. But if force of will can succeed, the institution is to pass away from before my mind, and to become as if it had never existed.

You will see that I am altogether averse to lending aid or countenance to any scheme which will tend to remind others that I was a teacher in the College which did homage to the evil it was created to oppose.

But I am even more sensible to my old pupils' remembrance than I should have been if I could have accepted the result of their most acceptable good opinion. Such remembrance would have been, in any case, a treasure. It has now the additional value of a treasure saved out of the fire.

You will, of course, communicate my answer, and with my warmest thanks and most heartfelt regards,

I am, my dear Waley,
Yours sincerely,
A De Morgan.

I commend my future with hope and confidence to Almighty God; to God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, whom I believe in my heart to be the Son of God, but whom I have not confessed with my lips, because in my time such confession has always been the way up in the world.