HAMILTON, SIR WILLIAM, a Scottish philosopher, born in Glasgow, March 8, 1788, died in Edinburgh, May 6, 1856. He was of aristocratic lineage, being the 24th male representative of the 2d son of Sir Gilbert, the founder of the noble house of Hamilton in Scotland. The ancestor from whom he inherited his baronetcy received his title in 1673, for the services of his father at the battles of Dunbar and Worcester. The baronetcy had lain dormant for some time when Sir William in 1816 formally established his right to the title. From his boyhood Hamilton manifested a great intellect, a fine sense of honor, and a frank and manly bearing. He entered the university of Glasgow, taking a high position in the classes, and carrying off the first prizes in philosophy. From Glasgow he proceeded, on the Snell foundation, to Baliol college, Oxford, in 1809, just after the introduction of a new system, by which a powerful stimulus had been given to the whole course of study, and great rivalry excited among the colleges; the degree examinations had, therefore, become more severe. The candidates for honors were required to profess a certain number of books in history, poetry, and science; but Sir William, in going up for his degree, not only took with him into the schools far more than the usual average of books in poetry and history-in fact, every classic author of mark, whether poet, orator, or historian-but in science he professed all the works extant in Greek and Roman philosophy, including not only the whole of Aristotle, but all the works of his earlier commentators; and not only all of Plato, but the NeoPlatonists, Proclus, and Plotinus, and the fragments of the earlier and later philosophical doctrines preserved by Laërtius, Stobæus, and the other collectors. His examination in philosophy occupied two days, running through 6 hours each day. "In 14 of his books on Greek philosophy," says an eye-witness, "he was not questioned, the greater part of these being declared by the masters to be too abstrusely met aphysical for examination." At this early age he had not only carefully studied the leading Greek commentators on Aristotle-Themistius, Alexander, Ammonius, Simplicius, and Philoponusand the works of the Arabian expositors, Averroes and Avicenna, but also the more philosophical of the Latin fathers, especially St. Augustine, of whom he always retained a high admiration, and the chief of the schoolmen, St. Thomas and Scotus in particular. He had also at this time formed an acquaintance with the less known authors of the revival, Cardan, the elder Scaliger, Agricola, Valla, and Vives; and had studied diligently the earlier modern philosophers, Descartes and Leibnitz, both in their own writings and those of their followers; and was deeply interested in the new speculations on the continent of Europe, which had as yet not found their way into Britain. He had, in fact, before he left the university of Oxford, gone over those vast researches into philosophical opinions which he afterward made so complete. In 1812 he

left Oxford, and went to Edinburgh to pursue the profession of the law, and in the following year was admitted a member of the Scottish bar. He at once began practice as an advocate. But, beside that the business of a young lawyer is not generally very engrossing, and therefore he had leisure for his literary pursuits, Sir William, like Bacon, could not confine his great powers within the narrow limits of a profession, but explored the amplitudes of science, especially inquiring into the hidden mysteries of the intellectual world. So ardent a student was he, searching into libraries for forgotten learning, and often perplexing bibliographers and scholars by his inquiries about unobserved first editions of books, and his ready and extensive knowledge of rare manuscripts, that he was looked upon as a prodigy of erudition in the social circles of Edinburgh. In 1820 the chair of moral philosophy in the university of Edinburgh became vacant by the death of Dr. Brown, and Sir William became a candidate for the place. John Wilson, his friend and fellow advocate, was his competitor. Sir William's superior qualifications were urged in testimonials of the greatest weight; even Dugald Stewart wrote: "I look forward with peculiar satisfaction to my future connection with him, if, fortunately for the university, he should succeed in attaining the object of his present ambition." Politics ran high at this time, and therefore every one was counted a whig or tory, whether he meddled in politics or not. Wilson was a tory; and as a majority of the electors were tories, Wilson was, of course, elected to the vacant chair. He proved to be an able professor; but, with all his genius for letters, he was, as a philosopher, far in the distance behind his friend Hamilton. By appointment of the faculty of advocates, Sir William, in 1821, delivered from the chair of universal history in the university of Edinburgh a short course of lectures on the character and history of the classic nations of antiquity, with the influence of their literature, philosophy, and laws on modern civilization. The lectures were distinguished for sagacity, learning, eloquence, and philosophical spirit. At this time phrenology, by the endeavors of George Combe, was exciting especial interest in Edinburgh. For the purpose of testing, on its own ground of physiological facts, the pretensions of this new claimant in the field of science, Sir William went through a laborious course of comparative anatomy, dissecting with his own hands several hundred different brains. He sawed open a series of skulls of different nations, of both sexes and all ages, to ascertain the facts in regard to the frontal sinus on which the phrenologists had founded so much. He also instituted a series of most sagacious experiments for ascertaining the relative size and weight of brains. The results of these investigations were embodied by him in two papers, and read before the royal society of Edinburgh in 1826. They maintained that the assertions of fact by the phrenologists were utterly false in every

fundamental particular; and some traditionary errors in physiology, which the medical profession itself had credited and taught in their writings, were rectified by some of Sir William's experiments. The points in which he had charged the phrenologists with fatal errors were reproduced by others on the continent of Europe as well as in Britain, and contributed to arrest the progress of the system. But there were errors of a more intellectual cast to engage his attention. Schelling and Hegel had propounded in Germany, each differing a little from the other, a scheme of human omniscience as a system of philosophy. A doctrine so extraordinary and of such high pretensions, upheld as it was by powerful talents, could not but arrest the attention of speculative minds. Victor Cousin, disciplined in the school of Descartes, where the supremacy of consciousness is the fundamental tenet, could only admit the omniscient doctrine of the German philosophers as modified by the fundamental dogma of his own school; and this he did, and proclaimed it to the world in a course of lectures distinguished for rare eloquence and great speculative genius well nurtured in the literature of philosophy. But a doctrine of human omniscience, however modified, can never escape being challenged by the common sense of man; and of all countries in Europe, Britain is the one least likely, from the course of its speculation for centuries, to let such a scheme of thought elude its criticism. Accordingly, in 1829, on the retirement of Lord Jeffrey from the editorship of the "Edinburgh Review," his successor, Professor Napier, a personal friend of Sir William Hamilton, being desirous of signalizing his first number, induced the latter to give him a philosophical article. Even while at Oxford, Sir William had scrutinized this portentous continental doctrine with profound interest, and now determined to weigh it in the scales of criticism, and show to the world its real worth both in its French modification and its native German originality. Adopting, therefore, the lectures of Cousin, then lately published, as the basis of his criticism, he put forth in the "Edinburgh Review" the most powerful, subtle, and effective polemic ever urged against a doctrine since man began to speculate. The exhaustive statement of the necessary conditions of the problem supposed to have been solved, and of all the possible forms of its solution, enabled him, by the use of the dilemma of which he was such a master, to expose the utter baselessness of a doctrine of human omniscience. His analysis of the notions of the absolute, the infinite, and the unconditioned, opened up a new vista in the province of speculation, and led to a more comprehensive and at the same time more accurate apprehension of the limits of the knowable, marking one of the most memorable epochs, and determining Sir William's historical position, in the progress of philosophy. When Cousin read this masterly disquisition, in which his doctrine was dissected and exposed

by a relentless dialectic, he pronounced it a masterpiece, and could not rest until he ascertained who the author was, and even had the chivalry to have it translated into French. In 1836 Dr. Ritchie, the professor of logic and metaphys ics in the university of Edinburgh, resigned his chair, and Sir William declared himself a candidate for the post. Prior to this he had contributed to the " Edinburgh Review" other articles, in which he examined all the central problems in metaphysics, psychology, and logic, showing that he was master of all the literature of philosophy, as well as possessed of a powerful genius for original speculation, which had attracted so much attention as to be, in conjunction with the first article, translated into most of the languages of Europe. He had made it manifest, that after examining the doctrines of his predecessors, he had laid speculative science on broader and securer foundations. But notwithstanding his preeminent qualifications, his pretensions were so far challenged, that it became doubtful whether he could be elected to the chair. M. Cousin, on hearing that there was a difficulty about Sir William's election, wrote a letter of mingled surprise and urgency in his behalf; and so did Professor Brandis of Bonn. He was elected and his country was saved from the disgrace of rejecting the best qualified man in the whole world for the vacant chair in her leading university.-Now begins a new era in Sir William's life, and in the academical life of Scot land. The great champion of Scottish philoso phy, who had dealt destruction to the proud system of speculation that had for a time overshadowed the humble doctrine of his own country, and which his own country itself had repudiated, is installed as a teacher of philoso phy in the leading university of Scotland. Sir William entered upon his professorship with every qualification. His personal appearance was the very finest. Above the middle height, of a sinewy and well compacted frame, with a massive head, decisive and finely cut features, a dark, calm, piercing eye, perfect self-possession and reliance, finished courtesy of manners and a voice remarkably distinct, silvery, and melodious, he stood before you the perfection of a man in every physical adornment. "Whatever," says Mr. Baynes, his class assistant, "the previous expectations of Sir William's appear ance might be, they were certainly realized if not surpassed; and however familiar one might afterward become with the play of thought and feeling on that noble countenance, the first impression remained the strongest and the lastthat it was perhaps altogether the finest head and face you had ever seen, strikingly handsome, and full of intelligence and power. When he began to read, Sir William's voice confirmed the impression his appearance and manner had produced. It was full, clear, and resolute, with a swell of intellectual ardor in the more meas ured cadences, and a tone that grew deep and resonant in reading any striking extracts from a

favorite author, whether in prose or poetryfrom Plato or Pascal, Lucretius or Virgil, Scaliger or Sir John Davies, whose quaint and nervous lines Sir William was fond of quoting." Though he had already methodized all his views on logic and metaphysics into a system, still he had now to put them into a form suited to academical instruction, and that for very young persons. The difficulty of doing this cannot be easily estimated. Consciousness with all its riddles has to be explained, the phenomena of which are not clustered like constellations in the firmament of thought, as those imagine who think of the mind as a congeries of faculties, but are confluent in all exercises of thought. Even intuition and reflection are not separate elements, but combine in the acts of consciousness. Neither is there pure passivity or pure activity in any operation of mind; but the passive and the active combine in all mental life. Then, again, the subject presents from beginning to end a grand antithesis. The knowing mind and the thing known-and that especially the mind itself—in all the phases of psychological phenomena, present never-ceasing antitheses that are to be made known to the self-consciousness of the pupil, both as contrasts and as unities. This dual character of the phenomena must never be lost sight of in the greatest subtlety of discussion; both the subjective and the objective must ever be realized in the pupil's self-consciousness as he reproduces the thinking of the teacher. To effect all this, not only must the language be so fashioned as to exhibit this duality in separation and in unity, but the whole scheme and order of the lectures must be planned so as to exhibit what in actual thinking is confluent and inseparable, as though they were distinct, and yet realizing at the same time their inseparable character. These syntheses and antitheses must ever be realized in the self-consciousness of the pupil. All these requirements Sir William accomplished in his academical prelections, as his "Metaphysical Lectures," recently published, sufficiently evince. The gradual opening of the subject, the increase of distinctness at each step, the exhibition of the successive phenomena without any commingling of phases, the different orders of discussion determined by the diverse orders of the topics considered, the judicious recapitulations at the beginning of the successive lectures whenever the subject in hand was embarrassed with special difficulties, the apt introduction of the history and polemics in regard to cardinal doctrines, all presented in a flexible, idiomatic, masculine diction, as clear as light, constitute these lectures a masterly academical lesson in metaphysics. As a scheme of discourse to teach young men to philosophize, they seem to be devised with consummate skill. Beside lectures, the class was severely disciplined by examinations, and by writing essays. This twofold mode of tuition Sir William had, in his letter offering himself as a candidate for the chair,

foreshadowed in these words: "I have only further to repeat, in general, what I have formerly more articulately stated, that in the event of my appointment to this chair, I am determined to follow out my own convictions of the proper mode of academical tuition; that is, I shall not only endeavor to instruct by communicating on my part the requisite information, but to educate by determining, through every means in my power, a vigorous and independent activity on the part of my pupils." His teaching produced the most intense mental activity in the pupil, and fired him with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge; and notwithstanding the commanding authority which his vast erudition, powerful genius, noble person, and wide fame gave to his teaching, he yet so inspired his pupils with the spirit of free thought that they learned to think for themselves even under his imperial eye.-In 1846, 10 years after his election to the chair of philosophy, Sir William published his edition of Reid's works, which was undertaken immediately upon his election, as a book for the use of his class. The impression which it made in Scotland may be inferred from the following extract of a letter from Lord Jeffrey to Mr. Empson, then editor of the "Edinburgh Review:" "I have been looking into Sir William Hamilton's edition of Reid, or rather into one of his own annexed dissertations, 'On the Philosophy of Common Sense ;' which, though it frightens one with the immensity of its erudition, has struck me very much by its vigor, completeness, and inexorable march of ratiocination. He is a wonderful fellow, and I hope may yet be spared to astonish and overawe us for years to come." These supplementary dissertations, together with his previous writings, at once placed Sir William on the highest elevation. In 1852 Sir William collected his contributions to the "Edinburgh Review," and published them with much original matter, under the title of "Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, Education, and University Reform," and in 1854 another edition greatly enlarged (republished, with an introductory essay by Robert Turnbull, D.D., New York, 1855). The last of his literary labors was his edition of the complete works of Dugald Stewart. He completed the task in 9 volumes, with the exception of a life of Stewart, which has been supplied in an able manner by Mr. John Veitch, one of his pupils, and a coeditor of his "Lectures."-For 10 years Sir William had been enfeebled by a severe paralysis, but yet had never relaxed his labors as a teacher, and only lessened them as an author. He finished his lectures of the session of 1855 and 1856, and distributed the prizes to his class; and after an illness of 10 days, he died at his residence in Great King street. "Notwithstanding," says a private letter, "the gradual increase of his physical infirmities, he suffered no pain, and the mind retained its acuteness, though not its energy, almost to the last." By the world, Sir William was only thought of as the learned man

and profound philosopher; but a letter from one of his family says: "We rarely or never thought of him in these characters, living as he did so simply and quietly in the midst of his family, accepting thankfully our trivial services, and taking a share and interest in all our little domestic pleasures and troubles." The death of Sir William Hamilton cast a shadow, from the firmament of thought, over the civilized world. It was seen that a great luminary had gone down beneath the horizon; and men began to think more earnestly about him, as one of recognized superiority. The facts which have been stated show that he was actuated through life by the noblest motives and the loftiest aims; and his performances seem almost incredible. When he gave to the world his first lesson in philosophy, hardly any of his countrymen understood it; but by his labors as a teacher and writer, his philosophy is now not only understood by thousands, but is influencing all the thoughtful literature of those who speak the English language. As a metaphysician he has never been surpassed. His discrimination between the conditioned and the unconditioned, and correlatively the respective provinces of knowledge and belief, affords the most powerful support that speculation has yet given toward upholding the doctrine of a moral universe. As the inventor and framer of logic, in its true sense, he stands next to Aristotle himself; and as the philosopher of logic, elevating it to the dignity of the science of the laws of thought as thought, he must be placed above Aristotle and the logicians of all ages. As a critic of systems, as a master of the older schools and of the classic sources of speculation, and as a tactician in philosophical polemics, he stands without a compeer in the great historical assembly of philosophers. Though possessed of the most subtle, profound, comprehensive, and aspiring genius, he was yet the most sober of observers, pursuing truth and only truth, never striving after novelty; and his stupendous erudition, instead of shackling the independent vigor of his mind, seems to have been so completely digested and assimilated, as only to nourish his robust mental energy and give it the combined powers of the thinkers of past ages controlled by his own originality. But Sir William's influence upon the age must not be estimated by his philosophy alone. His immense erudition, while it furnished a model for imitation, has quickened the scholarship of the world, by hints which will elicit investigation in the same directions; and in his admirable disquisition on the Epistola Obscurorum Virorum, he has given an example which astonished even the Germans. Neither must we overlook his physiological labors. His polemic against phrenology, in the several papers appended to the first volume of his "Lectures," rivals in experimental sagacity any inquiry in human physiology, from John Hunter to Richard Owen. His paper in the "Edinburgh Review," reprinted in the "Discussions," on the

life of his grandfather's friend, Dr. Cullen, deserves notice as evidence of the thoughtfulness with which he had read the history of medical doctrine. Sir William's father and grandfather were professors of anatomy and botany in the university of Glasgow; and their tastes for physiological inquiries descended to him. "The philosopher," says Aristotle, "should end with medicine, the physician commence with philosophy." If this precept were observed, there would be fewer wild speculators in mental philosophy, and fewer physicians who cultivate medicine only as a trade, and are indifferent to all that transcends the sphere of vulgar practice. But the most important of Sir William's writings next to those on philosophy are his papers on educational reform. The decisive power with which, in the "Edinburgh Review," he attacked the abuses which had destroyed the true character of Oxford, and damaged all the other schools of Britain, accompanied as it was by such comprehensive views of what education ought to be, together with such erudite researches into the history of the educational institutions which had nurtured the civilization of Europe, opened the eyes of the British public to their ignoble condition, and has led to the university commissions which are reforming the education of the United Kingdom. There are no papers upon public matters within the whole compass of British history, that for fierceness of hostility, fulness of information, profound intelligence, and resistless dialectic, can be favorably compared with them. Other political papers were directed against matters of shifting policy; but these were about the greatest of all institutions, except the family-the schools where men are educated to truth or error, to a noble and catholic spirit, or to bigotry of sect and party. After examining more particularly the organizations of schools, in a subsequent paper he attacked, with great force of argument backed by overwhelming authorities, a cardinal heresy in education, then lately put forth at Cambridge by Dr. Whewell, viz.: that mathematics is a better logical discipline than logie itself. In other of his writings, Sir William has shown that of all mental gymnastics, the study of the ancient classic languages and logic is, beyond all comparison, the most efficient for broad culture and a harmonious development of man's whole nature.-The historical and doctrinal position of Sir William Hamilton in the progress of philosophy can, in a work like this, be only indicated. The philosophy of Bacon was a recoil against idealism. Observation of the external world was the one great precept of his philosophy, assuming as it did that the external world is distinct from the mind and is real; its whole aim is realism. Locke, in continuing the Baconian movement, inconsistently fell into the common error at that time, that in observation we do not perceive the external world, but only something representative of it. By thus incumbering observation with a false hypothesis repugnant to the validity of obser

vation, Locke's philosophy was pregnant with covert absurdity. Therefore it was that David Hume, in the true spirit of scepticism, accepted the doctrine of Locke and exposed the absurdity which it involved. Hume, in fact, showed that philosophy is either altogether a delusion, or that the doctrine of Locke is erroneous or incomplete. Philosophers were therefore constrained either to surrender philosophy as impossible, or else to ascend to higher principles for defence against the sceptical reduction. Hume thus put philosophy into a dilemma that forms a memorable crisis in the history of speculation. His scepticism awoke the sensualism of Britain and the rationalism of Germany from their respective dogmatic slumbers. It was manifest that the problems of speculation must be considered in new aspects and subjected to a more searching analysis. Reid attempted to rescue British philosophy from the scepticism of Hume. He saw that Hume's reasoning proved that the doctrine of representative perception involved not only the denial of the existence of matter, but, by the fairest sequence, the denial also of the substantiality of mind. He therefore strove to vindicate the unconditional veracity of consciousness, which testifies that we do immediately perceive the external world; and by the analysis of mental phenomena, he established the cardinal doctrine in metaphysics, that what our nature compels us to believe as true and real, is true and real, called the doctrine of common sense. Kant, startled, like Reid, by the scepticism of Hume, strove to connect cause and effect, which Hume had shown, upon the doctrine of sensualism, to be correlated only by succession in nature, and by custom in thought. Kant made causation the central problem of his philosophy, while Reid made external perception the central problem of his. But Kant decided the adverse destiny of his philosophy by his first step. He started with the received doctrine of the day, that we do not immediately perceive external objects, as consciousness testifies; but that what is illusively seen as the external world is only a modification of our minds, and that reality is only a necessary illusion. Having thus declared consciousness to be untrustworthy, his philosophy ended in making intelligence self-contradictory in its natural and necessary exercise. And as, according to his philosophy, truth consists in the harmony of thought with thought, and not of thought with things, the spirit of his philosophy encouraged the most unexclusive doubt. The doctrine of Kant, that the external world is a necessary illusion imposed on us by a treacherous reason, admitted, however, that there may be a reality corresponding to this necessary illusion. In this aspect his philosophy is a hypothetical realism. But Fichte showed by a rigorous logical analysis that at bottom Kant's philosophy is absolute idealism denying any external world. Consciousness having been repudiated by Kant as a witness, Schelling claimed for the mind an intellectual intuition, which is above consciousness, and

released from the laws of the understanding, and comprehends the absolute by becoming the absolute, and thus knows God by being God; and by this method Schelling conceived that he had explained the knowledge of external reality. Hegel next attempted to solve the problem of existence and of knowledge; and without repudiating consciousness, as Schelling had done, he claimed that by sifting mental phenomena man can rise to absolute knowledge, through a dialectic process which starts from the thesis that being and nothing are the same; and that, so far is contradiction from being an insuperable barrier to intellectual cognition, it is the chief instrument in laying the foundation of our higher knowledge, which in fact ends in the consummate paradox and ultimate truth, that contradictories are one, and universal negativity is the essence of thought. Such were the attempts to solve the problem of knowledge and of existence, and to conciliate the contradictions in human thinking that resulted from the subtle conceptions of Hume, which doubted the existence of any reality. At this crisis in speculation Sir William Hamilton appeared. With an accurate knowledge of all that had ever been written on the central problems of philosophy, he saw that all the errors in speculation resulted from repudiating consciousness as an infallible witness, and ignoring the laws of the understanding in the highest speculation. He saw that Reid was right in his doctrine, that we perceive external realities immediately, because consciousness so testifies; and he directed his energies to develop this doctrine. He also saw that the contradictions in thinking which Kant thought inherent in human intelligence, and which led Hegel into such a monstrous paradox, arise only when intelligence transcends the limits to which its legitimate exercise is restricted, and that within these limits intelligence does not naturally or necessarily contradict itself. He therefore strove to point out the limits or conditions of thought, and to indicate the province of faith, demonstrating that there must be existences in which we must believe though we cannot know them. So that his labor was to bring back philosophy from its aberrations in paradoxes to repose on common sense, declaring that there is certainty in knowledge, there is a real external world which we know immediately, and a moral universe known to us through our moral nature, which implies a moral order and a moral governor of all. Such is the aim and scope of Sir William Hamilton's philosophy.-Many of Hamilton's notes are included in the abridgment of Reid's "Essays on the Intellectual Powers" by Dr. James Walker (Cambridge, 1850). From his notes and dissertations on Reid, and his discussions on philosophy, a volume was arranged by O. W. Wight, entitled the "Philosophy of Sir William Hamilton" (New York, 1853; 3d ed. 1855). A selection of his academical lectures is announced to be published in 1859, edited by Mansel and Veitch. See notices of Sir William Hamilton in the