ART. II.-1. Memoir of Sir William Hamilton, Bart. By JOHN VEITCH, M. A. Edinburgh and London. 1869. 2. Fragmens de Philosophie, par M. William Ilamilton, professeur de logique et de metaphysique à l'universitė d'Edimbourg. Traduit de l'anglais par M. LOUIS PEISSE, avec une préface, des notes et une appendice du traducteur. Paris. 1840.

3. Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, Education, and University Reform. Chiefly from the Edinburgh Review. Corrected, vindicated, enlarged in notes and appendices. By SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. 2d ed. 1853. London and Edinburgh.

WHILE keeping in view the nobler uses of biography, a very barren record of the daily life of such a man as Hamilton-the simple story of the eating and the drinking of one from whose intellectual table have fallen so many crumbs that repay the gathering and over whose coffee and wine soared a discernment that gave no hint of their inspiration-while such a narrative would have been welcomed almost as a duty by the wise there is that about Professor Veitch's memoir which may make it of use even to the relatively ignorant. Gratitude should prompt the scholar to turn the leaves of any record of one who has turned for him so many pages in the volume of human thought; but the pigmy, also, may seek this memoir, confident that such introduction to an intellectual giant as it will give him cannot but increase his own mental stature. Indeed, we have sometimes fancied that it is of just such examples as Hamilton's that the average American has greatest need. The scholar allows the attempt to precede the preparation, and in the end mourns that he did not inherit from his father, and as a national characteristic, less of the youth's confident rashness, and more of the well-poised energy of mature age. Our generals, too, often attempted after defeat the or

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ganization and the cautiousness they had spurned before. We sometimes insist upon swinging a sceptre that we cannot sway; and our huzzas are as apt to herald loss as gain. Now, apart from philosophy itself, there can be no better corrective of all this than the life of such a philosopher as Hamilton. It is possible, indeed, that we should not make the exception we have made. But we would not have it suspected that we think the pure philosophy too concentrated to be nourishing when men are prepared and willing to relish it. We are, however, conscious that very few of all mankind have shown any disposition to sit down to the feasts of unadulterated thought that have long been spread on the Continent and in England, and which we hope to see one day adorning America. Nay, it must be so, or our national life will ultimately be a failure. No amount of material resources can atone for a lack of mental wealth. Though the oceans bound our empire, it must remain but a geometrical surface unless it reaches also to the stars; and the bridging of Niagara or the laying of an ocean telegraph must be counted as little in comparison with attempts to span the time-stream that separates the present from the future, or to elicit a queen's or a president's response to the questions we ask of our spiritual life.

In so far as our philosophers stimulate to thought of this kind they prevent our paving the way to another of those "parentheses of darkness," which, monitors from the past, have, more certainly than any thing else, indicated that, notwithstanding progress in an infinite development, there is still a possibility that some one age may reappear as the portionless heir of those which have preceded it. At present, indeed, every thing would seem to be tending toward moral development, but that tendency owes its existence in great part to ignoble policy; and policy, though it may serve the centuries, has ever proven unfaithful to the cycles. In so far as our disposition to cherish good-will and multiform good-faith is the offspring of commercial convenience, we know that it must eventually "perish with the using." To thrust a more durable foundation beneath our moral and social system, and to

show men how strangely inconsistent with this care to plant fruit and shade trees for generations is their neglect to plant men tally and morally for the ages, has become, more than ever before, the practical work which great thinkers have to perform, and in doing which they shall merit the thanks of their usually unappreciative fellow-men. For, as Mill has said, "a true psychology is the indispensable scientific basis of morals, of politics, and of the science and art of education." In support of our position we beg to be allowed to suggest the source of the argument rather than the proof itself. It is briefly this: A Whitefield has become, or soon will have become, as impossible in our pulpits as an Edmund Keane in our theatres. Our active and somewhat anxious life seems to preserve the mental at the expense of the emotional, or, at least, to have brought the latter so under the control of the former as to have made of man a new creature. By this change, though the end may remain relatively the same, an alteration in the means is necessitated; our preachers must be re-schooled by our psychologists, and the professorship which has thus far, in this country, been deemed scarcely worth an endowment will become the cherished one of our colleges.

Leaving this a rudis indigestaque moles, we hasten the story of Hamilton, with its suggestions of what is possible in scholarship and influence, and its lessons of warning, making it one of our major aims to indicate the influence of his life upon his belief. And pleasant will it be, remembering the essential connection between mind and bodily manner, if we find in the outward life of the man fit source of the thought he gave us. Though the mills of the gods, indeed, ground but slowly in Hamilton's case, he would seem to have been fated by the circumstances of his birth for the position he afterward adorned. For he belonged to a race of professors, and many branches of his genealogical tree had been sheltered within the walls of Glasgow University. His grandfather and his father taught and died there, and there, on the 8th of March, 1788, in a house in the Professors' Court-now marked, as if significantly, No. 1-the philosopher first opened his eyes

upon a world he was destined to make broader and higher. That grandfather and father were professors of anatomy and not of mental science can be of much interest only to one who would introduce a happy thought into an essay on materialism. But that both filled such positions in life as they did, and that Dr. William Hunter could write of the father that it was to the interest of Glasgow to seek him as a professor rather than his to seek the professorship, are important, as enabling the subject of our sketch to escape condemnation on the ground of Carlyle's assertion that no truly great man was ever born of entirely stupid parents. It is probable, too, that we see the influence of his hereditary linking with anatomy, in Hamilton's conviction, in youth, that medicine was to be his profession, and in those zealously conducted surgical experiments which he continued almost to the time of his death. For although, as a cosmologist, he drew a line of separation between mind and matter, which is so far from a mathematical one, that a majority of philosophers have stumbled over it, yet he could scarcely distinguish his affection for one as greater than his interest in the other. In him George Combe found the most formidable opponent of phrenology. For, after perhaps a more careful examination of the anatomy of the brain than had hitherto been made, Hamilton pronounced that science "a mischievous humbug." He published various papers upon this and kindred topics; and has left direct evidence of the 'extent and accuracy of his studies in a statement that he had carefully weighed with a delicate balance, tabulating the results, more than one thousand brains of some fifty species of animals. Mrs. Hamilton says of the victims of these researches:

"There was a constant succession of young animals about the bouse, for the purpose of being experimented upon. Pins or wires were passed in various directions through their heads by Sir William, and the consequent effects upon their powers of motion, sight, taking of food, etc., were not only considered by him scientifically valuable, but were sometimes so comical as to afford us much amusement-indeed, to watch these vagaries was a favorite diversion of Sir William's.

"When he made a visit in the country, he took his instruments

with him, and would get hold of fowls and chickens, which he left with wires sticking in their heads, and which were sometimes sent to him months afterward to show how well they had thriven, notwithstanding this unusual treatment."

occurred to us as de

Other observations, that have often sirable, did not escape that acute mind. We refer to a study of the development of his own children. Hamilton, however, seems to have confined his attention to their cerebral and physical growth; to daily weighings, with measurements of their heads, and drawings representing their varying configuration.

It has long seemed to us that a servant of science, who could reasonably count on a liberal reward, would be the thoroughly-trained parent, abreast with the times in philosophical lore, who should observe, with the keen insight which such preparation would confer, the whole growth of her offspring-subjecting different children to various treatment, and carrying to a conviction in one the hint caught vaguely from another. But, while Hamilton thus manifested his curiosity with regard to the structure of the brain, there is not a hint throughout his works that he regarded it as any thing more than the principal haunt of the thought which he so of ten attempted to pursue into its hiding-place. Not one recorded word escaped his lips which indicated a reverence for the brain as the source of thought; in short, if living today, he would have no sympathy with the bold conception which makes it perform its functions in common with the other organs of the body.

But there is another and more important observation with which we hope to justify this detailed recital of his anatom ical studies. The whispered suggestion of incompleteness and inconsistency in Hamilton's system of philosophy, which a few years ago startled the pupils of the great teacher, has recently cast aside the bated breath of merited reverence, and spoken in the full tones of animated controversy. The champions of the empirical psychology, necessarily selecting him as the conspicuous target of the opposing system, have, we fear, some