BOOKS.

THE LIFE OF SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON.*

SOME thirty-three years ago, any day between November and April, and between the hours of twelve and one o'clock, a notice- able figure might have been seen progressing at a great pace along the North Bridge of Edinburgh in the direction of the University. The face, somewhat of the Roman type, with flashing dark eyes, the stalwart frame, the blended look of eagerness, impatience, and strength, the portfolio under the left arm, the swinging step, all suggested at once to the spectator the passing-by of no ordinary man. Indeed, excepting the leonine appearance of Christopher North, who seemed to make the pavement ring again as he walked along, there was no such bodily presence to be seen in the Modern Athens at the date of which we speak. Like Wilson, this man would be a formidable antagonist in a stand-up fight or wrestling- match, and it is reported of him that while a student at Oxford, a party being assembled in his rooms, he rushed to the door, at which an unlucky tutor was listening, and seizing the academical authority by the collar, lifted him right over the banisters, and held him suspended in mid-air—the light having been previously extinguished—until the reverend inquisitor proclaimed his dignity, and sued for mercy and deliverance. As we need scarcely inform our readers, the athlete of Oxford, whom we have sketched as hurrying to the Edinburgh College, is the recently appointed Professor of Logic, Sir William Hamilton. In all probability, he had not been an hour out of bed, as the lecture he was about to deliver had not been finished—the valiant Lady Hamilton enacting the part of amanuensis through the long night—until four or five o'clock the same morning.

• Memoir of Sir William Hamilton, Bart., Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in the University of Edinburgh. By John Veitch, M.A.. Professor of Logic In the University of Glasgow. Edinburgh : Blackwood and Sous. 1855. The fact of this late composition of the day's lecture illustrates what we must call the fatal peculiarity of Sir William's mental habitude. There was in him, with all his invincible energy and insatiable hunger and thirst after book knowledge, a dominating vice of delay. It is doubtful if we should ever have been acquaiuted at all with his conclusions respecting Perception, the Conditioned, or the Quantification of the Predicate, unless his friend Mr. Macvey Napier, on assuming the editorship of the Edinburgh, had coerced him into authorship. And, perhaps, no contributor ever occasioned his editorial chief so much worry, so much bewilderment and dismay, as did this most learned of all modern Scotchmen. Sir William's articles were always late, were some- times scarcely completed when sent at last, and were invariably too long. Of course, his contributions were worth waiting for, and on their appearance they won for their author an European reputation. But all the same, it was unmitigated harassment to the captain of the ship, so to speak, to have to run the risk of losing the tide through the dilatoriness of an occasional passenger, who never was on board until the twelfth hour, and then came rushing with such a quantity of luggage that there was scarcely room to stow it in. The only parallel instance which we can remember as we write to this procrastinating .persistency in a great mind is that of Coleridge. In Coleridge's case the postponing habit seems to have been induced by narcotics. In that of Sir William Hamilton some other cause must have been in operation, for it appears that his powerful physique was so little affected by laudanum that he could swallow some 450 drops of it without suffering any but the slightest inconveniences from the draught. Of course, an outsider would be ready to jump to the conclusion that the man who experimented so freely on his own nervous system, and whose writing work was never done except in a spasmodic way, must have seriously impaired his power of vo- lition. It would seem, however, that Sir William's unreadiness was not created or aggravated by any carnal indulgence, but was rather a native vis inerthe which lie never roused himself sufficiently to conquer. And as one looks at the portrait prefixed to the life before us, one seems to see indications of weakness and irresolution about the mouth and chin, in remarkable contrast with the capacity which is indicated by the magnificent forehead. His Fabian characteristic, blended with sudden impulses of rushing into print, was strikingly illustrated at the time of the famous disruption of the Kirk of Scotland in 1843. Sir William had, doubtless, read all the legion of pamphlets which had been issuing for ten years from the Scottish Press on the question which finally rent the Northern Establishment in twain ; and fifty times during the progress of the fray, we may safely assume that he had medi- tated striking a blow. However, he held his hand, until at last, the very week before the exodus of the "Frees," the fire burnt in him so hotly that he could no longer remain a mere inactive spectator. Familiar for years with the Continental ecclesiastical authorities, to whom the controversialists on both sides had made their confi- dent appeal, and believing that the French, Swiss, and German Reformers did not sanction the " absolute " Veto, or " uncondi- tioned " assertion of the popular will, in the appointment of minis- ters,—which the Chalmers party held to be fundamental, he hastily marshalled his formidable array of quotations, and hurried through the press a pamphlet with the title, "Be not Martyrs, be not Schismatics, by Mistake." But, alas ! the publication was too late, and Sir William's waruiug words were not heard until the day after the disruption had taken place. Edinburgh was convulsed with laughter, and Hugh Miller was nowise loth to exhibit the great professor of logic in the columns of the Witness, under the light of what we may call his "Old Red" humour, as valiantly arriving on the field of fight when the battle was over.i.

If we try to account to ourselves further for this procrastinating infirmity of a noble mind, we can gather from his biography one or two additional reasons. And, first of all, he had no ambition, in the ordinary acceptation of the word. He rather resembled the disembodied shade of Arthur Hallam, as Tennyson conceives it, contemptuous of the hollow wraith of dying fame, and exulting in the self-infolded forces which could at pleasure forge a name if it was worth while. It is true he served himself heir to the lapsed baronetcy of the Hauailtous of Preston, but he was quite content to be a poor baronet, and so little did he care to achieve a fortune in some measure commensurate with his rank, or perhaps demanded by the exigencies of his domestic circum- stances, that we find his friends besieging the Treasury for a pension

We have not read this brochure of Sir William since its first appearance, but it struck us at the time as being as inconclusive as it was inopportune. One of the sayings in it, however, was too memorable to be forgotten. Speaking of the opinion of a multitude, he likened it to the height of a crowd, which, after all, cannot be greater thus that of the tallest man iu it.

in his behalf when, in 1846, his 58th year, he was suddenly struck down by paralysis. In this matter of the pension to Sir W. Hamilton, Lord Russell, who was Premier at the time, is con- spicuous by the absence on his part of even common-place capacity to recognize the claims of the distinguished scholar. A paltry, annuity of £100 a year was all that could be afforded to the man who raised Scottish learning to a height it had scarcely ever reached before, who gave to Scottish speculation a celebrity unknown since the days of Hume and Reid, and who for the last ten years had been elevating indefinitely the whole tone and standard of literary and philosophical training in the university which, at the time we speak of, his name mainly represented to Europe ! The suns was so ludicrously small that Sir William at first refused it, and, in the end, only consented to accept it on condition that it should be settled on Lady Hamilton. At the same time, we cannot help believing that a little of the Walter Scott secular ambition, with a little of Scott's literary industry, would have saved Hamilton from this experience of British Philistinism, which was all the more Philistine that Hamilton, though he would not stoop to be a partizan, was a very ardent supporter of the Liberal cause.

Again, the pet dogma of the cleft-stick in which, as he con- cluded, the human intellect finds itself imprisoned, between an absolute finite and an " unobtrusive," indeed, but " unconditioned" infinite, must, to a certain extent, have arrested the spontaneous energies of his spirit. The alleged " counter-imbecilities" of the mind—the dead stone wall on the one hand, the nebulous infinite on the other—may have begotten in him a fearfulness, in spite of all his native courage, lest, by any instantaneous movement, he might dash his head against the former, or lose it in the latter.

Once more, his Samson-like sense of humour may have tempted him to pooh-pooh many contemporary interests. Yet, paradoxical as it may seem, it was this very sense of the ridiculous, in concert with the logical perception of the absurd, which would at times rouse him into activity and indignant denial. Phrenology was laughably absurd. Transcendentalism was a practical joke played off ou the " imbecilities," and the popular clergy of the Kirk were about to ride out into the wilderness on a huge mistake ! In illustration and proof of what we mean, it is stated that Sir William was in the habit of letting off his humour by grotesque drawings on the margin of his manuscript.

But his intense conscientiousness seemed to say to him, 'Don't write on any subject until you have refreshed your memory with everything that anybody else has said about it. Until you have gone through all the fields of knowledge with a double rake, have gathered all your gleanings into one heap, have thrashed and winnowed them, and thoroughly severed the wheat from the chaff, you must not grind a peck of grain, or manufac- ture even a penny loaf.' Doubtless, we honour the thorough- going habit of investigation which Sir William possessed, and we like the saying of Jean Paul Richter, "Never read until you have thought yourself empty, and never write until you have read yourself full ;" but if each article we write is to involve the careful analysis of all the treatises which have been penned on the subject which it embraces, it is clear that literature must become an affair of bibliography. Sir William when about to write seemed always to accumulate his materials as if instead of having to contribute results of his own, he was on the eve of undergoing an examination, and as if the memory of his graduation in Oxford, when the list of books in which he was prepared to be examined was quite unparalleled in the annals of the University, demanded an indication of still ampler knowledge. We have sometimes said to ourselves what a good thing it would have been for Sir William, for his family, and the world if he had been lashed to the helm of a daily paper. The feeling of necessity being laid on him to meet the daily demand might have wrought great marvels ; but, after all, we must take men as we find them, and must accept with admiration, if with much regret, this phenomenon of a scholar who could survey the realms of literature and philosophy as Herschel surveys the starry heavens, and yet cared so little to communicate to others a record at all commensurate with the wide sweep of his intelligence.

We have, to be sure, obtained his notes on Reid, his discussions, and the lectures to his logic class, which were crushed out as in a wine-press, during the first year of his professorship ; but it is somewhat mournful to make a list of Sir William's Meditations," which never came to the birth. He meditated a classified synopsis of his rare library, he meditated the lives of the Scaligers. His very Luther, whom, in reality, he admired more than he gave the world reason to suppose, was a meditation. It suited him better to weigh brains, and he was a discoverer in the matter of the growth of the human brain ; to stick pins in the heads of a small menagerie which he kept for experimental purposes in his back garden; to come down with his sledge-hammer, once in a way, on Gall and Spurzheim, rather than grapple with the details of a professional life in law or medicine, or give us such a coherent narrative of the progress of philosophy as would have immortalized his name as an historian.

The son of a professor of medicine, Sir William Hamilton was born within the precincts of the University of Glasgow in 1788.

His mother, whom he loved and honoured, was an able and cultivated woman, though rather of the Spartan type, and perhaps the facile good-nature with which he ruled his own life was in part a recoil from the sternness of her After a distinguished college career, he went to Oxford on a " Snell exhibition." It was before the days of athletic sports that

Hamilton went to Oxford, but for the time that then was be was a notable athlete. In feats with the leaping-pole, as if symbolic of his intellectual Kantian leap over the hard and fast categories of the understanding into the region of liberty, immor- tality, and God, he had no equal. His examination raised him to an eminence on which he stood alone ; but no fellowship followed, and ultimately Hamilton studied for the Scottish Bar. 1Ve are told that in the Northern Teind or Tithe Court, in which he held a not very lucrative post, he was a great authority ; but it was a weariness to his flesh and soul to pace with gown and wig the floor of the "Parliament House." He took refuge in the Advocates' Library, and was glad to bury himself there. After holding the Chair of Civil History for sixteen years, in which at at last he was pretty much Caesar without an army—the students being, as we understand, a mere handful—he was, in 1836, elected to the Chair of Logic, and that position he held until his death. Sir William could not stoop to " mendicate " the votes of the patrons of college preferment—the enlightened Town Council of Edinburgh—with whom a great qualification was being, as one of them told an English candidate for the chair, " a j'int member o' some bodie," i.e., a Church communicant, and he only secured his election by four votes.

Sir William was perfectly competent to have filled at once all the chairs of the literary and philosophical curriculum in the Edin- burgh University except those of mathematics and natural philo- sophy. And the antecedents of the class over which he was called to preside, the majority of the members being, as a rule, mere boys, ranging from 14 to 16 or 17 years of age, might lead one to suspect that he would with difficulty succeed in bringing his audience within "sparking distance" of his speculations. Even the editor of the Edinburgh professed his inability to comprehend all that he meant to advance in his articles. However, Sir William's professorship was from the first a marked success. In due time his class left all others comparatively in the shade. Pillans, in the Chair of Humanity, taught carefully, and, by his literary sympathies, awakened in many an interest in general knowledge which they will always gratefully ascribe to him. 1Vilson —Christopher North—by his glowing and at times magnificent rhetoric, by the tones of his deep-sounding voice, by the com- manding expression of his broad forehead, flowing locks, and kindling eye, as he stood like a man inspired and creat- ing before the bundle of loose papers which lay on his desk, begot an immense personal enthusiasm. The Professor of Natural Philosophy, James Forbes—the Forbes of the Glaciers—tall as a giraffe, and almost feminine in manner and accent, would hold entranced the select few who could follow him through the course of an elaborate statical or dynamical demonstration ; but the master who left his mark, who made disciples, was Hamilton. And to mention none others, there are four, whose names occur in this biography, who can not only tell us what Hamilton was like,—tell us of his noble kindliness, his affability, his unwearied readiness to help, his wide and minute acquaintance with all manner of subjects, his beautiful home-life, his order, discipline, and method in his class, but who have made his thinking their own, and these are Hamilton's successor in the Chair of Logic, Alex- ander Fraser, Professor Baynes of St. Andrew's, Dr. John Cairns of Berwick, and the able author of this admirable life, Professor Veitch, of Glasgow.

Sir William Hamilton spent his life chiefly in " thinking about thinking," but if we except his Quantification of the Predicate, a very important contribution to the science of formal logic, we can- not discover that he has made any fresh additions of his own to the stock of speculative thought. lle took up speculation as to the conditions of human thought exactly where Kant had left it, and he did not advance it a single step. He was caught in the antinomies of the Kiinigsberg sage, and stuck fast between them, as far as we can discover from his writings. Of course, a reader like Sir IV. Hamilton was well acquainted with the specific diferentix which distinguish Herbart, Fichte, Schleiermacher, Sehelling, and Hegel from each other in the great controversy 'touching the contents of our speculative ideas. But we cannot learn from him the relative nuances of their respective theories, the points in which they coalesce, or at which they mutually diverge. All the same, we honour Sir William for his great candour, his lucidity, and the ardour with which he fought against what seemed to him the perilous assumptions of a philosophy transcending the possible conditions of human thought.

Did our space allow, we should like to try to show that if the idea of the Infinite is not giren, it is quite impossible ever to reach it inferentially, for no addition of finites can ever yield an infinite, I and that if the idea of the Infinite is wholly inconceivable, then human worship becomes a mere pretence or a vulgar superstition. But we cannot go into these matters now. It is more satisfac- tory to us to listen to the latest utterance of this great scholar and profound dialectician, in which at last he seems not so much to find as to be jinind, and to hear him whisper of that Shepherd whose rod and staff stay and comfort when all the con- ditions of time are falling from around us. Ile died in his sixty- eighth year, 18:56, and on the tablet to his memory erected in St. John's Episcopal Chapel, Edinburgh, beneath which his mortal body was laid, occur the following touching words :—" His hope was that in the life to come he should see face to face, and know even as he is known."