or brought such intensity and penetrative power to bear on so vast a field of research. "The demon of energy," says one who knew him, "was powerful within him; and had it not found work in the conquest of all human learning, must have sought it elsewhere. You see in him the nature that must follow up all inquiries, not by languid solicitation, but hot pursuit. His conquests as he goes are rapid, but complete. Summing up the thousands upon thousands of volumes upon. all matters of human study in many languages which he has passed through his hands, you think he has merely dipped into them, or skimmed them, or, in some other shape, put them to superficial use. You are wrong; he has found his way at once to the very heart of the living matter of each one; between it and him there are henceforth no secrets!"*

When to these capabilities of acquisition we add his marvellous powers of thought, his acuteness, his comprehensiveness of grasp, his force and lucidity-an individuality of intellect which, amid all his familiarity with the opinions of others, ever stood out clear-cut and persistent—the fervour, the native force of will and purpose, little sustained and as little deflected by outward circumstances, which inspired and directed the course of his life-studies, the profound and catholic nature of the subjects of his speculations, and the mark which he has left on them, we may fairly claim for Sir W. Hamilton, without considering how far the conclusions of his philosophy are to be accepted as final, a position among the thinkers of metaphysical Scotland at once high, peculiar, and permanent.

No man in this century has lived more completely in the realm of past thought than Hamilton, and at the same time. set more conspicuously in the light of historical reflection questions that in themselves are of an interest to man too pressing and constant to have only a past. He has entered the order of abstract thinkers, taken up the course of their thought, and continued their work; and his name will go down to posterity * Mr Hill Burton-Book-Hunter, p. 119, 2d ed.

with the best known of them. No one could more truly than he have appropriated to himself these words, to indicate what he was when he lived, and what he would be in memory:

"My days among the dead are past;
Around me I behold,

Where'er these casual eyes are cast,
The mighty minds of old :
My never-failing friends are they,
With whom I converse day by day.

"My hopes are with the dead; anon
My place with them will be,
And I with them shall travel on
Through all futurity;

Yet leaving here a name, I trust,

That will not perish in the dust."

Nine years after Sir William's death, a subscription was commenced with the view of raising a fund to found a Philosophical Fellowship in honour of his memory. This movement was mainly carried through by Dr John Muir of Edinburgh, to whom our universities are indebted for the Shaw Philosophical Fellowship, and to whose zeal the cause of the higher education in Scotland owes much. The sum raised, along with the amount added to it by the Association for the Better Endowment of the University of Edinburgh, has been set apart to form the fund of "The Hamilton Philosophical Fellowship." The annual proceeds of it are given to the Master of Arts of the University of Edinburgh of not more than three years' standing, who passes the best competitive examination in Logic, Metaphysics, and Moral Philosophy. The competition takes place once in three years.

Out of the fund collected for the Fellowship a sum was set apart for providing a bust of Sir William. The execution of this work was intrusted to Mr William Brodie, R.S.A. The bust, which is considered to be an excellent likeness, was, on its completion, presented by the subscribers to the Senatus Academicus of the University, and was placed in the Senate Hall of the College in December 1867.

APPENDIX.

NOTE A.

ON THE REVIEW OF COUSIN; AND ALLEGED CONTRADICTION IN
SIR W. HAMILTON'S PHILOSOPHY.

THE nature and limits of the present work do not permit of any adequate consideration of the philosophical doctrines of Sir W. Hamilton, or extended examination of the criticisms to which they have been recently subjected by Mr Mill and others. These criticisms, even when most adverse, may fairly be taken as evidence of the strength of the impulse which Hamilton has given to speculative thought in eminently materialistic times. I cannot, however, even in the present work, omit referring generally to what appears to me the gross, even ludicrous, misrepresentation of Hamilton's doctrines-especially on the subject of the review of Cousin— which Mr Mill has given to the world.*

It was obvious, from the first edition of the Examination,' that. Mr Mill's acquaintance with the questions which Hamilton discussed in the review of Cousin did not extend beyond what he obtained from the author he was criticising, and that he had not reached any adequate conception of the real drift of the Essay. The alterations and modifications, avowed and silent, of the third edition, still show the same perfervid eagerness to demolish; but they do not evince any increased acquaintance with the real points of the philosophy assailed.

* In regard, indeed, to the doctrine of the Conditioned, a minute examination of these criticisms is the less called for after the admirably clear, acute, and powerful exposure of Mr Mill's misconceptions of Sir W. Hamilton's doctrines by Mr Mansel, in his 'Philosophy of the Conditioned.'

Thus we find him persistently representing the main question of the article as being whether we have, or have not, "an immediate (!) intuition of God." * The truth is, that it is nothing of the sort; the question is not primarily or mainly this at all. The nature and limits of our knowledge of Deity are, no doubt, points involved; but only indirectly. But the question as to whether our knowledge of Deity is or is not immediate, is irrelevant to the real question of the article. That question is, Does the alleged notion of the Infinitoabsolute, or the notion of the Absolute, or the notion of the Infinite, afford us a knowledge of any object possible or real? Can we realise in thought a concrete object that shall be at once infinite and absolute, or either the one or the other? This question, in so far as it relates to Deity at all, refers not to the process or mode by which we know Deity-whether immediate or inferential-but to the nature and degree of our conception of Deity. The question, What is the amount of our knowledge of God? still remains to be asked, whether we hold that our knowledge of Deity is obtained by intuition or by inference; for the process by which we reach the reality of Deity does not necessarily determine the extent of our knowledge of His nature and attributes; that is, whether we know Him in the fulness of His being, or, only partially, in certain of His manifestations.

Further, the central question of the discussion does not necessarily refer to Deity at all. We may settle it, even affirmatively, without conceiving an object that is identical with Deity. For suppose we found and proved, as Mr Mill thinks he has proved, a positive conception of time without end, or of space and time as absolutely completed, we should have determined affirmatively the question of the capacity of the mind with regard to an object infinite or absolute, but surely not with regard to an object convertible with Deity. Or, to refer to other aspects of the question, we may maintain such a knowledge of self, of our own being, or of the world around us, as is altogether independent of their phenomenal manifestations—that is, an absolute knowledge, in the strict historical usage of the word. Theories of this nature were implied in the dogmatic systems of metaphysics before Kant; and they have been explicitly held since his time. In discussing such doctrines we are dealing with the question as to the nature and extent of our knowledge of reality, finite and infinite, but not properly or directly with the reality of Deity.

Then, again, we may hold with some philosophers that it is competent for the human mind to reach a conception of what is called pure being-being above space and time,-that is neither one nor many-out of all relation, above every form or mode in which our ordinary consciousness contemplates finite or relative existence,-i.e., the Unconditioned or Absolute, as it has been called. We actually have in this one form of answer to the question of the Essay on the Unconditioned; yet we should hardly regard this as identical with the notion of Deity, or think that we were now discussing any question about our knowledge of Him or His reality.*

No doubt the decision of the question of the article in the negative affects by implication the view we take of the nature and extent of our knowledge of Deity; for if we cannot conceive any object of thought as infinite or absolute, Deity as an object of thought cannot be conceived as either infinite or absolute. And this is really the way in which the decision of the general question of the discussion is brought to bear on M. Cousin's alleged notion of the Absolute, which he identifies with God. M. Cousin not only maintains that we are able, under the laws of our ordinary thought and consciousness, to conceive God as absolute, but holds also that He is directly presented to us as absolute in our conscious experience. Hamilton maintains, on the other hand, that M. Cousin's Absolute is not a genuine conception of an absolute object-that no such conception is possible in human consciousness-that he mistakes what is merely a relative notion for the idea of an absolute object, and consequently that he deceives himself in supposing that any object corresponding either to the Absolute or the Infinite is directly given as a reality in our conscious experience.

The confusion on this point has arisen chiefly from Mr Mill and other critics not keeping in view the twofold application of the terms," the Absolute" and "the Infinite," when employed in a wider and narrower meaning-an application which it was one special merit of Hamilton to detect and unfold. "The Absolute" and "the Infinite" may each be employed to indicate the alleged union of two contradictory notions, or alleged notions. These opposite notions, or, as Hamilton calls them, "counter-imbecilities of the

* See Schelling's treatise, 'Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie, oder über das unbedingte im menschlichen Wissen.' Schelling, speaking of this treatise, says:-" Die erste zeigt den Idealismus in seiner 'frischesten Erscheinung, und vielleicht in einem Sinn, den er späterhin verlor. Wenigstens ist das Ich noch überall als absolutes, oder als Identität des Subjectiven und Objectiven schlechthin, nicht als subjectives genommen."-Vorrede, p. v.