Mill's chief philosophical work was, however, his Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829). In this he laid the foundation in psychology for the utilitarian superstructure. It is a compact statement of a theory of mind elaborated on the same method as that by which any department of nature might be studied. Mental phenomena are reduced to their simplest elements, and the association of these into groups and successions is investigated, all association being reduced by him to one law-that of contiguity. In general, Mill follows Hume and Hartley-but Hartley much more than Hume. He disregards, however, the physiological side of Hartley's theory, so that his own doctrines are purely psychological. To the psychological school of a later date, whose leading representatives were John Stuart Mill and Alexander Bain, his chief positive contribution was the doctrine of inseparable association; in addition, he marked out afresh the lines to be followed by a theory which attempts to explain the facts of consciousness from the "association" of ultimate elements called "sensations"-assumed as themselves not in need of explanation.

A position intermediate between the associationism of Mill and the traditional doctrines of the Scottish school was taken by Thomas Brown, professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh from 1810 till his death in 1820. By the time he was twenty years of age Brown had published Observations on the Zoonomia of Erasmus Darwin (1798), which was recognised as a mature criticism of that work. Seven years afterwards, in 1805, an ecclesiastico-academical controversy drew from him a small volume entitled Observations on the Nature and Tendency of the Doctrine of Mr. Hume concerning the Relation of Cause and Effect, of which a second enlarged edition was published in 1806 and a third edition, further enlarged and modified in arrangement and title, in 1817. In this book, he maintained the view that causation means simply uniform antecedence, "to whatever objects, material or spiritual, the words may be applied"; but he held, also, that there was an intuitive or instinctive belief that, "when the previous circumstances in any case are exactly the same, the resulting circumstances also will be the same."

Brown's work on causation certainly showed him to be possessed of an intellect of penetrating philosophical quality; and it may be noted that, in his preface to the second edition of it, he already laid down two principles which distinguished his subsequent writing. One was that the "philosophy of mind" is to be considered as a science of analysis; the other was the implicit rejection of the doctrine of mental faculties as it had figured in previous academic philosophies. Functions such as memory or comparison, he says, are merely names for the resemblances among classes of mental facts. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1820), published after his death, these principles were applied to the details of perception and cognition. He made the important distinction between the muscular sense and touch proper, resolved knowledge of extension into a succession of muscular sensations, and knowledge of the external world into a number of constituent sensations, but held, nevertheless, to the real existence of the physical object on the ground that it was implied in the intuitive belief in causality. In these doctrines, and in his analysis of "relative suggestion," he made contributions to psychology which were largely original, although he was considerably indebted to De Tracy and other predecessors. The eloquence of his style, as well as the subtlety of his analyses, made his lectures famous during his lifetime and, in their printed form, for many years after his death. They were written hastily, each lecture to meet the demand of the following day, and they are too ornate in style for scientific purposes. The shortness of the author's life, and his own unfortunate preference for his poetical works over his philosophical, prevented a thorough revision of what he had written or a consistent and adequate development of his views.

III. SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON AND OTHERS

Hamilton's reputation has not withstood the test of time; but, in his own day and for a number of years afterwards, his was one of the two names which stood for the revival of philosophical thought in Great Britain. His pre-eminence was not altogether undisputed, however. Even from his younger contemporaries who did most for Scottish metaphysics, differ

ent opinions regarding his merit may be gathered. Ferrier regarded him, morally and intellectually, as "amongst the greatest of the great": whereas Hutchison Stirling found in him "a certain vein of disingenuousness that, cruelly unjust to individuals, has probably caused the retardation of general British philosophy by, perhaps, a generation." The truth lies somewhere between these extreme views, and it is important to arrive at a correct estimate of Hamilton's work in order to understand the course of British philosophy.

Sir William Hamilton was born in 1788, in the old college of Glasgow, where his father was a professor. He was educated there and at Oxford, was called to the Scottish bar and, in 1836, appointed to the chair of logic and metaphysics at Edinburgh. In 1844 he had a stroke of paralysis, and, although he was able to continue the work of his professorship until his death in 1856, he never recovered his physical strength. His published work began with a number of articles in The Edinburgh Review, republished in 1852 as Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, Education and University Reform. The most important of these were three articles on "the Philosophy of the Unconditioned," "the Philosophy of Perception" and "Logic," which appeared between 1829 and 1833. He afterwards devoted himself to the preparation of an edition of Reid's Works, which he illustrated with elaborate appended "Notes," chiefly historical in character. This work was published in 1846; but the "Notes" were never completed and are of the nature of material rather than of literature. After his death, his Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic were published in four volumes (1858–60).

Hamilton's positive contributions to philosophy are connected with the topics of the three articles already named. Indeed, except as regards logic, these articles contain almost all that is essential and original in his work. But other points have to be taken into account in estimating his influence upon philosophical thought.

Since the time of Descartes, continental thought had had little effect upon English philosophy. Leibniz and even Spinoza were hardly more than names.

P. vii.

Helvétius had in

I Ferrier, J. F., Scottish Philosophy: the old and the new (1856), pp. 15, 16.

. Stirling, J. H., Sir W. Hamilton: being the Philosophy of Perception (1865),

fluenced Bentham, and De Tracy Thomas Brown; but Helvétius and De Tracy themselves worked on lines laid down in England-the lines of Locke. The doctrines of Locke, Berkeley and Hume, together with the ideas of the deistical movement, had entered into the European tradition; but the reaction which they produced, and which began with Kant, was for long ignored in England. One or two enthusiasts tried to make Kant known, but their efforts were without result; an article on Kant by Thomas Brown in the second number of The Edinburgh Review (1803) only showed the poverty of the land. Coleridge, indeed, was a much more important medium; he brought into English literature ideas which had been derived from Kant and his successors, and he was recognised by John Stuart Mill as representing a type of thought, antagonistic to the dominant Benthamism, which had to be reckoned with. But the teaching of Coleridge was prophetic rather than scientific, and the philosophical student had to be approached in his own language and by a master who had the command of traditional learning as well as fresh doctrines to teach. It was here that Hamilton's cosmopolitan learning broke in upon British philosophy and lifted it out of the narrow grooves into which both the Scottish academic teachers and the English Benthamites had fallen. Hamilton's learning struck most of his contemporaries as almost superhuman; it was certainly vast, and, as certainly, without precedent at the time. It made possible a new orientation in philosophy. The special problems to which discussion had become restricted were seen as part of a larger field of enquiry which extended over the whole of western thought from ancient Greece to modern Germany. Hamilton, however, had the defects of his qualities. He never obtained easy mastery of his own learning; he would summon a "cloud of witnesses" when a single good argument would have been more to the purpose; and his selection of "authorities" was often ill-judged: they were numbered instead of weighed; and he would spend time over third-rate schoolmen or equally third-rate modern Germans which would have been better spent if devoted to a sympathetic understanding of Kant and Hegel. Nevertheless, Hamilton's work in this respect is important. He overcame the provincialism of English thought and he brought it into connection with the

greatest of the new German philosophers. It may have been an imperfect Kant that he revealed; Fichte, Schelling and Hegel were brought forward as objects of criticisms only. But the traditional circle of English thought was broken, and new ideas were brought within it.

Hamilton came forward as a reconciler of Scottish and German thought-of Reid with Kant. It was only an imperfect synthesis that he worked out, but the enterprise was notable. His logical work, indeed, stands to some extent apart. He followed Kant in his strictly formal treatment, and he devoted a large amount of time, and no little ingenuity, to the elaboration of a modification of the formal doctrine of the traditional logic. This modified doctrine made a great stir for many years, and was even hailed as the greatest logical discovery since the time of Aristotle. It is known as "the Quantification of the Predicate." Hamilton's own expositions of it are incomplete and are contained in appendixes to his Discussions and to his Lectures. The clearest accounts of his views have to be sought in An Essay on the New Analytic of Logical Forms (1850), by his pupil, Thomas Spencer Baynes, and in An Outline of the Laws of Thought (the first edition of which was published in 1842), by William Thomson, afterwards archbishop of York. But the gist of the matter can be put very shortly. According to the traditional view, in a judgment or proposition, an assertion is made about something; that is to say, the subject is said to possess or not to possess the quality signified by the predicate. When made not about an individual thing, but about a group or class, then the assertion may be meant to apply to every member of the class or only to some of them; it is, therefore, necessary to indicate this, or to express the quantity of the subject. The predicate is not similarly quantified. But a quality is always potentially a class—the class of things which possess that quality. The most elementary of logical operations implies that it can be treated as such and assigned a quantity as the subject of a new proposition. Hamilton's "new analytic" depends upon the contention that the quantity thus implied should be always explicitly stated, and consists in following out the changes in formal procedure which seem to him to result from this being done. But Ham

Baynes, T. S., Essay on the New Analytic (1850), p. 80.