ART. IV.-1. Account of the Life and Writings of Thomas Brown, M.D. By Rev. D. WELSH. 1825. 2. Edinburgh University Essays, 1856. Art. VII. Sir William Hamilton. By THOMAS SPENCER BAYNES, LL.B. IN the edition of the "Encyclopædia Britannica" now in the course of publication, there is a continuation of the Historical Dissertations on the Progress of Natural Philosophy; but, as yet, there has been no continuation of the Dissertations on the Progress of Metaphysical and Ethical Philosophy. We are at this moment without an account of the phases which mental science has assumed of late years in Scotland. We are not, in this article, to attempt to supply this defect. We are to content ourselves with a sketch and a criticism of the two men who have exercised the greatest influence in a department in which Scotland has been allowed to excel. We are aware that Dr Thomas Brown and Sir William Hamilton, whom we place side by side, differ very widely from each other; but their peculiarities will come out more strikingly by the contrast; and it may be interesting, and instructive withal, to observe the one sinking as the other rises above the horizon. There would be no propriety in giving a history of Dr Brown, since we have a full and admirable memoir in a work so accessible as his "Life" by Welsh, and an excellent compend of this in the short notice which prefaces the common edition of Brown's "Lectures." In regard to his younger years, it will be enough for us to mention, that he was born at Kirmabreck, in the stewartry of Kirkcudbright, in January 1778; that his father, who was minister of that place, died soon after, when the family removed to Edinburgh; that he there received the rudiments of his education from his mother; that, in his seventh year, he was removed to London, under the protection of a maternal uncle, and attended successively schools at Camberwell, Chiswick, and Kensington, down to the time of the death of his uncle, in 1792, when he returned to Edinburgh, to reside with his mother and sisters, and begin his collegiate course in the University. He is described as a precocious child, and we can believe it. He was precocious all his life, and in everything. We have to regret that he did not take sufficient pains to secure that the flower which blossomed so beautifully should be followed by corresponding fruit. We can credit his biographer, when he tells us that he learned the alphabet at a single lesson; but we suspect that there must have been the prompting of some ministerial Brown's Review of the "Zoonomia." 403 friend preceding the reply which he gave, when he was only between four and five, to an inquiring lady, that he was seeking out the differences in the narratives of the evangelists. At school he was distinguished by the gentleness of his nature and the delicacy of his feelings; by the quickness of his parts, and particularly by the readiness of his memory; by his skill in recitation, and his love of miscellaneous reading, especially of works of imagination. Nor is it to be forgotten that he also gave promise of his genius for poetry, by verses which one of his masters got published, perhaps unfortunately for the youth, in a magazine. He read with a pencil in his hand, with which he made marks; and, in the end, he had no pleasure in reading a book which was not his own. He began his collegiate course in Edinburgh by the study of Logic under Finlayson; and having, in the summer of 1793, paid a visit to Liverpool, Currie, the biographer of Burns, introduced him to the first volume of Stewart's "Elements." The following winter he attended Stewart's course of lectures, and had the courage to wait on the Professor, so renowned for his academic dignity, and read to him observations on one of his theories. Mr Stewart listened patiently, and then read to the youth a letter which he had received from M. Prevots of Geneva, containing the very same objections. This was followed by an invitation to the house of the Professor, who, however, declined on this, as he did on all other occasions, to enter into controversy. It is but justice to Stewart to say, that he continued to take a paternal interest in the progress of his pupil, till the revolt of Brown against the whole school of Reid cooled their friendship, and loosened the bonds which connected them. In 1796 he is studying law, which, however, he soon abandoned for medicine, and attended the medical classes from 1798 till 1803. At college, he received instructions from such eminent professors as Stewart, Robison, Playfair, and Black, and was stimulated by intercourse with college friends, such as Erskine, Brougham, Reddie, Leyden, Horner, Jeffrey, and Sidney Smith-all precocious and ambitious like himself, and who, in the "Academy of Sciences," debated on topics far beyond their years and their knowledge. It was when Brown was at college, that Darwin's "Zoonomia" was published, and excited, by its superficial plausibility, an interest resembling that which the "Vestiges" has done in our day. Brown reads it at the age of eighteen, and scribbles notes upon it; these ripen into a volume by the time he is nineteen, and are published by him at the age of twenty. It is a remarkable example of intellectual precocity. In the midst of physiological discussions, most of the metaphysical ideas which he developed in future years are to be found here in the bud. He considers the phenomena of the mind as mental states, speaks of them as "feelings," delights to trace them in their succession, and so dwells much on suggestion, and approaches towards the theory of general notions, and the theory of causation, expounded in his subsequent works. It should be added, that the book committed him prematurely to principles which he was indisposed to review in his riper years. It appears from a letter to Darwin, that, at the age of nineteen, he had a theory of mind which he is systematizing. Out of the "Academy of Sciences" arose, as is well known, the "Edinburgh Review," in the second number of which there was a review, by Brown, of Viller's "Philosophie de Kant." The article is characterized by acuteness, especially when it points out the inconsistency of Kant, in admitting that matter has a reality, and yet denying this of space and time, in behoof of the existence of which we have the very same kind of evidence. But the whole review is a blunder, quite as much as the reviews of Byron and Wordsworth in the same periodical. He has no appreciation of the profundity of Kant's philosophy, and no anticipation of the effects which it was to produce, not only on German, but on British thinking. Immersed as he was in medical studies, and tending towards a French Sensationalism, he did not relish a system which aimed at showing how much there is in the mind independent of outward impression. The effects likely to be produced on one who had never read Kant, and who took his views of him from that article, are expressed by Dr Currie: "I shall trouble myself no more with transcendentalism; I consider it a philosophical hallucination." It is a curious instance of retribution, that, in the succeeding age, Brown's philosophy declined before systems which have borrowed their main principles from the philosophy of Kant, and deal as largely with à priori "forms," "categories," and "ideas," as Brown did with "sensations," "suggestions," and "feelings." We feel less interest than he did himself in two volumes of poetry, which he published shortly after taking his medical degree in 1803. His next publication was a more important one. The chair of mathematics in Edinburgh was vacant, and Leslie was a candidate. The city ministers attached to the Court party wished to reserve it for themselves, and urged that Leslie was incapacitated, inasmuch as he had expressed approbation of Hume's doctrine of Causation. It was on this occasion that Brown wrote his "Essay on Canse and Effect"-at first a comparatively small treatise, but swollen, in the third edition (of 1818), into a very ponderous one. It is divided into four parts; -the first, on the Import of the Relation; the second, on the Brown's Essay on Cause and Effect. 405 Sources of the Illusion with respect to it; the third, on the Circumstances in which the Belief Arises; and the fourth, a Review of Hume's Theory. The work is full of repetitions, and the style, though always clear, is often cumbrous, and wants that vivacity and eloquence which so distinguish his posthumous lectures. It is characterized by great ingenuity and power of analysis. He has dispelled for ever a large amount of confusion which had collected around the relation; and, in particular, he has shown that there is no link coming between the cause and its effect. He agrees with Hume, in representing the relation as consisting merely in invariable antecedence and consequence. In this he has been guilty of a glaring oversight. It may be all true, that there is nothing coming between the cause and its effect, and yet there may be, what he has inexcusably overlooked, a power or property in the substances acting as the cause to produce the effect. It is but justice to Brown to add, that, in one very important particular, he differs from Hume; and that is in regard to the mental principle which leads us to believe in the relation. This, according to Hume, is mere custom; whereas, according to Brown, it is an irresistible intuitive belief. By this doctrine, he attached himself to the school of Reid, and saved his system from a sceptical tendency, with which it cannot be justly charged. This irresistible belief, he shows, constrains us to believe that the universe, as an effect, must have had a cause. It is to be regretted that he did not inquire a little more carefully into the nature of this intuitive belief which he is obliged to call in, when he would have found that it constrains us to believe, not only in the invariability of the relation, but in the potency of the substances operating as causes to produce their effects. We are not concerned to follow him in his medical career, in which he became the associate of the famous Dr Gregory in 1806. We are approaching a more momentous epoch in his life. Dugald Stewart being in a declining state of health, Brown lectured for him during a part of sessions 1808-9 and 1809-10; and, in the summer of 1810, Stewart having expressed a desire to this effect, Brown was chosen his colleague, and, from that time, discharged the whole duties of the office of Professor of Moral Philosophy. Even those who have never seen him can form a pretty lively image of him at this time, when his talents have reached all the maturity of which they are capable, and his reputation is at its height. In person, he is about the middle size; his features are regular, and in the expression of his countenance, and especially of his eye, there is a combination of sweetness and calm reflection. His manner and address are somewhat too fastidious, not to say finical and feminine, for a philosopher; but the youths who VOL. XXVII. NO. LIV. 2 D wait on his lectures are disposed to overlook this, when they fall under the influence of his gentleness, so fitted to win, and of the authority which he has to command. Expectation was on the tiptoe, and he fully met and gratified it. His amiable look, his fine elocution, his acuteness and ingenuity, his skill in reducing a complex subject into a few elements, his show of originality and independence, the seeming comprehensiveness of his system, and, above all, his fertility of illustration, and the glow, like that of stained glass, in which he set forth his refined speculations, did more than delight his youthful audience-it entranced them; and, in their ecstacies, they declared that he was superior to all the philosophers who had gone before him, and, in particular, that he had completely superseded Reid, and they gave him great credit, in that he generously refrained from attacking and overwhelming Stewart. He had every quality fitted to make him a favourite with students. His eloquence would have been felt to be too elaborate by a younger audience, and regarded as too artificial and sentimental by an older audience, but exactly suited the tastes of youths between sixteen and twenty. A course so eminently popular among students had not, we rather think, been delivered in any previous age in the University of Edinburgh, and has not, in a later age, been surpassed in the fervour excited by Chalmers or Wilson. There are men of sixty, still spared to us, who fall into raptures when they speak of his lectures, and assure the modern student, that, in comparison with him, Wilson was no philosopher, and Hamilton a stiff pedant. It should be added, that, when the students attending him were asked what they had got, not a few could answer only by exclamations of admiration, "How fine!" "How beautiful!" How ingenious!" In those large classes in the Scottish colleges which are taught exclusively by written lectures, large numbers, including the dull, the idly inclined, and the pleasure-loving, are apt to pass through without receiving much benefit-unless, indeed, the professor be a very systematic examiner and laborious exacter of written exercises; and this, we rather think, Brown was not. As he left the impression on his students, that there was little wisdom in the past, and that his own system was perfect, he did not, we suspect, create a spirit of philosophic reading such as Hamilton evoked in select minds in a later age. But all felt the glow of his spirit, had a fine literary taste awakened by his poetical bursts, had their acuteness sharpened by his fine analysis, went away with a high idea of the spirituality of the soul, and retained through life a lively recollection of his sketches of the operations of the human mind. This, we venture to affirm, is a more wholesome result than is likely to be produced by what some would substitute for psychology in these |