CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION-SIR W. HAMILTON AND MR. MILL. If any one competent to offer an opinion on such a subject were asked, Who are the most influential philosophic thinkers of Britain, in this the third quarter of the nineteenth century? he would at once and unhesitatingly name Sir William Hamilton and Mr. John Stuart Mill. For the last twenty or thirty years the former has had great authority in Scotland, and considerable power in Oxford and among the Dissenting colleges of England; has been much admired in the United States of America; has been favourably known in France, and heard of even in Germany, where few British metaphysicians attain a name. Mr. Mill has qualities which specially recommend him to the English mind, and of late years he has got a firm hold of the rising thought of Oxford and Cambridge, where young minds, in the recoil from the attempt to impose the mediæval forms upon them, have taken refuge in the Empiricism and Utilitarianism so lucidly expounded by him; while writers bred at the great English Univer A sities have, in certain portions of the London press, been constantly and apparently systematically quoting him, or referring to him, as possibly the only philosopher known to them, or at least appreciated by them. It should be added that he is known in France as the English representative of their own Positive School; and his clear logical expositions have been esteemed by not a few in Germany, anxious to escape from the inextricable toils of Kant and Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. These two men are alike in the greatness of their intellectual power, and in the range of their attainments. But they differ widely in their peculiar mental endowments and predilections, in the manner in which they have been trained, and the influences under which their opinions have been formed. Hamilton is known to have received a thoroughly complete collegiate education in classics and philosophy; to have afterwards had his logical powers sharpened by the study of law, and his extensive information widened by his researches when Professor of History; while his pursuits were made finally to centre in mental science by his appointment as Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in the University of Edinburgh. Receiving his early college training in Glasgow, where the influence of Reid was predominant, he retained through life a profound reverence for the common sense philosopher. Completing his academic education at Oxford, he fell under the sway of Aristotle, and found in him much that was congenial to his own intellectual nature, and was led to study his philosophy not only in his own writings, but in the pages of his commentators, and in the modification of his logic constructed by the schoolmen. In the course of his multifarious reading he could not but fall in with constant references to Emmanuel Kant as a profound thinker, and, as he entered upon the study of his works, could not but be impressed with the vast logical power of the German metaphysician. These three, Reid, Aristotle, and Kant, are the men who have exercised the greatest influence on the studies and the thoughts of the Scottish philosopher. But in his vast and rare reading he delighted to find truth scattered like gold dust in the pages of forgotten writers of all ages and countries, and, rejoicing in the discovery, he often magnified its value as he hastened to bring it forth to the public view in an age and country which seemed to him greatly deficient in scholarship. His intellectual features stand out very prominently. A discerning eye might have seen from the beginning that his independent and impetuous mind would impel him to follow a course of his own; and that, while probably destined to lead, he would not be led--certainly would not be driven by others. He is evidently moved by a strong internal appetency to master all learning, and he spent his life in accumulating stores which, after all, fell immeasurably beneath his high ambition. Along with this he has a masterly capacity of retention and power of arrangement. His skill in seizing the opinions of the men of all ages and countries: the ancient Greeks, the philosophic fathers of the Church, the schoolmen, the thinkers of the age of the Revival of Letters,—such as Scaliger, and of the continental metaphysicians from the days of Descartes to about the year 1830, has never been equalled by any British philosopher. His powers of logical analysis, generalization, and distribution are scarcely surpassed by those of Aristotle or Thomas. Aquinas or Kant. I have to add, that while he has also superior powers of observation, he has, like most metaphysicians, often overridden and overwhelmed them by logical processes, and hastened by dissection, division, and criticism to construct prematurely a completed system of philosophy-such as is to be built up, only as systems of physical science are formed, by the careful inductions of successive inquirers conducting their work through successive ages. In this respect he has imbibed the spirit of Kant, and has not followed the examples set by the more cautious school of Reid and Stewart. His manner and style are very decided and very marked. Any man of sharp discernment could easily recognise him at a great distance, and detect him under the most rigid incognito. To some ears his nomenclature may sound uncouth and crabbed, being coined out. of the Greek or borrowed from the Germans; but these persons forget that chemistry and geology and anatomy have all been obliged to create a new terminology, in order to embody the distinctions which they have established. Hamilton is certainly without the power of poetical or oratorical amplification for which Brown and Chalmers of the same University were distinguished; and he is deficient in the aptness of illustration in which such writers as Paley and Whately excel; still his manner of writing has attractions of its own. His phraseology, if at times it sounds technical or pedantic, is always carefully explained and defined, and is ever scholarlike in its derivation and articulate in its meaning. His style is never loose, never tedious, never dull; it is always clear, always terse, always masculine, and at times it is sententious, clinching, and apothegmatic. In reading his works the reader need entertain no fear of being led into a Scotch mist, or being met by a fog from the German Ocean. Not unfrequently dogmatic, at times oracular, resolute in holding by his opinions when attacked, and on certain occasions, as in his assaults on Luther, Brown, Whately, and De Morgan, giving way to undue severity and passion, he is ever open, manly, and sincere. He uses a sharp chisel and strikes his hammer with a decided blow, and his ideas commonly stand out before us like a clean cut statue standing firmly on its pedestal between us and a clear sky. Indeed we might with justice describe his style as not only accurate, but even beautiful in a sense, from its compression, its compactness, its vigour, and its point. His thoughts, weighty and solid as metal, are ever made to shine with a metallic lustre. At the places at which his speculations are the most abstract and his words the baldest, he often surprises us by an apt quotation from an old and forgotten author; or a sudden light is thrown upon the present topic by rays coming from a hundred points. If we have not the flowers or the riches, |