Though somewhat an excrescence upon the discussion of metaphysical topics, we cannot dismiss without some notice the ninety pages of the "Life and Letters of Reid," which occupy the opening part of the volume, and which, introducing us as they do to the genius and peculiarities of an individual man, and associating these with the exercise of abstract speculation, may prove to many readers not the least interesting section of its contents.

The letters addressed by Reid to several of his distinguished contemporaries, form the most important supplementary matter appended by Sir William Hamilton to the biography by Stewart. Nearly all of this correspondence may be included in three parcels (1.) Thirteen letters, written by Reid during the first six years after his removal from Aberdeen to Glasgow, to Drs. A. and D. Skene, physicians in Aberdeen. These interesting documents were furnished by Mr. Thomson of Banchory, and have not before been published. They contain some amusing pictures of Glasgow University in the last century, and "afford what was perhaps wanting to Mr. Stewart's portraiture of Reid -they shew us the philosopher in all the unaffected simplicity of his character, and as he appeared to his friends in the familiar intercourse of ordinary life." (2.) Nine letters addressed to Lord Kames, and already published in Lord Woodhouselee's memoirs of that philosopher. These afford some suggestive thoughts on what we may style the metaphysics of physical science. This and the former body of letters, also illustrate Reid's intelligent interest in the sciences of external nature, such as chemistry and mechanics, on their own account. (3.) A selection from upwards of twenty of Reid's letters to his kinsman, the late Dr. James Gregory, Professor of the Practice of Medicine in the University of Edinburgh. Of these the most curious parts relate to the controversy on free-will, and to the theory of causation.

Stewart's "Account of the Life and Writings of Reid," is a work so well known to most of those in this country who are even moderately versed in the history of recent philosophy, that we need hardly occupy our readers upon anything like an abstract. of its contents. A life of which the greater part was passed in the humble but agreeable seclusion of academical office successively in two Scottish provincial universities, cannot be expected to offer incident for the gratification of the lovers of brilliant external adventure, and must derive its interest from the peculiarities of the mental phenomena which it manifests, and the circumstances by which these were called forth, or amid which they struggled into action. Himself born in the commencement of the eighteenth century, Dr. Reid's ancestors by the father's side

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were for generations ministers of the Church of Scotland, in the parishes of Banchory Ternan in Aberdeenshire and Strachan in Kincardineshire, and some of them were not unknown in the world of letters. By his mother he was connected with the most illustrious of the Scottish hereditary aristocracy of talent-the renowned family of Gregory. The name of Reid, and the associations connected with his family, may thus increase the interest of the thoughtful traveller in the beautiful vale of Dee. As the favourite residence of Reid himself, and of his friends Campbell, Gerard, and Beattie, the town and neighbourhood of Aberdeen may be regarded as classic ground in reference to the philosophy of Scotland.

The early youth of the philosopher does not seem to have given remarkable promise of the eminence which he afterwards reached, but his love for an academic life was soon indicated and probably increased by his more than usually protracted residence at Marischal College, and by his subsequent visits to the more splendid academical establishments of England. For fifteen years he was the pastor of the remote rural parish of New Machar, where, according to Mr. Stewart," the greater part of his time was spent in the most intense study; more particularly in a careful examination of the laws of external perception, and of the other principles which form the groundwork of human knowledge." Gardening and botany were the chief relaxations of the meditative country clergyman. In 1752, he was elected professor of philosophy in King's College, Aberdeen, where he found the opportunity to mature his doctrines, and to test them in a course of active public instruction, at the same time that he was one of the founders and leaders of a Literary Society which then rendered Aberdeen a focus of Scottish intellects. From King's College Reid was, in 1764, removed to the chair of Morals in Glasgow, which he occupied actively for nearly twenty years, after which, until his death in 1796, he was engaged in preparing for the press and publishing his final and more elaborate treatises, in a serene old age, eminently characteristic of the long term of cheerful meditative industry, and the habits of integrity and self-control which had marked his life.*

The Scottish Philosophy of Dr. Reid, and the Scoto-German

*It may be noted that (except the Tract on "Quantity," which was published in 1748,) Reid's first work, " An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense," appeared in 1764,-in his fifty-fourth year. It was followed in 1774 by a "Brief Account of Aristotle's Logic," which originally appeared in the second volume of Lord Kames' "Sketches of the History of Man." Reid's "Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Mun" were published in 1785, and those on the "Moral Powers of Man" in 1788. These treatises, along with a "Statistical Account of the University of Glasgow," published in 1799, three years after his death, are the " Works of Reid," now for the first time collected in this edition.

Philosophy of Sir William Hamilton, constitute together an important stage in the great revolution which metaphysical science has been undergoing since the age of Des Cartes, and as such they occupy an important historical place in modern philosophy. A few sentences of explanation may illustrate this.

Des Cartes is an influential and prominent person in the succession of great thinkers chiefly because he was a thoroughgoing doubter, who, by means of his doubts, got rid of a huge accumulation of propositions, assumed on authority to be true, the intellectual division, generalization, and argumentation of the contents of which formed the matériel of the preceding or scholastic epoch of philosophy. The Cartesian scepticism raked up the foundations of things, and during the lifetime of the philosopher himself, as well as since, it has communicated a corresponding impulse to meditative minds by whom his works have been studied. Des Cartes doubted in order to believe and know. From the foundation down to which his doubts conducted him he attempted to rear a comprehensive theory of knowledge. But the reconstructive has exerted small influence compared to the destructive part of his teaching, and it is mainly through the operation of the latter element that a revolution in the manner of thinking regarding the first principles of every sort of knowledge is the permanent result of his labours.

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The period of the history of human thought that has intervened since Des Cartes is filled by a series of more or less imperfect reconstructions of philosophy, i. e., of the ultimate theory of knowledge, out of the confusion consequent upon the sceptical method of the French philosopher. The attempt of Locke, in the "Essay concerning Human Understanding," is the first of prominent historical importance. That great work is still perly an unfinished one. The metaphysical thinking of the last century and a half has been employed in working out the problem suggested in it, which the author himself had however carried a long way towards a satisfactory solution. The name of Locke, associated with the names of Clarke and Butler, distinguishes the close of the seventeenth and the commencement of the eighteenth century as the Augustan era of metaphysical science in the southern division of the island.

The imperfection or one-sidedness of Locke's philosophy, as regards the expression of its fundamental principles, was exhibited, in what is virtually the form of a reductio ad absurdum, by David Hume, in his "Treatise of Human Nature," where, on the principles of Locke, all knowledge is reduced to a succession of phenomena, while permanent existence and philosophy are proved to imply a tissue of contradictions.

The philosophical doubts of Hume occasioned another inde

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pendent effort to find the theory of knowledge. A conservative reaction, against the universal scepticism which he had extracted from the doctrine of Locke, was manifested almost contemporaneously in Scotland by Thomas Reid, and in Germany by Immanuel Kant—in Scotland with a tendency to what is practical and palpable, and in Germany to idealism and pantheism.

The epoch of Reid and Kant is distinguished by making the original structure of human intelligence a principal object of scientific attention. Each philosopher sought to find in that quarter a refuge from scepticism, and the only possible ultimate explanation of knowledge. Reid, on the inductive method of Bacon, systematically collected, under the name of " principles of common sense," those inexplicable beliefs, or original living faculties, which must be assumed in all knowledge. His doctrine is formed by means of a reflex attention to that common sense which is spontaneously exercised by the many. Kant, assuming the famous test of necessity as the basis of his critical investigation, demonstrated the originality of many of those notions which Hume had rendered up as the illusions of a universe of mere phenomena. He thus exhibited a theory of subjective knowledge, seemingly self-consistent and permanent; while Reid exhibited those beliefs which are the security, if not the explanation, of all knowledge, subjective and objective. Both supplemented Locke. The " Essay Concerning Human Understanding" had furnished an important analysis of what is contributed to our knowledge by experience, marked by the freshness of an independent thinker, who subjects old assumptions to a renewed act of careful observation. But in his desire to find, by means of induction, the limits within which the human mind may be advantageously occupied, Locke had omitted to examine critically the original structure of intellect that is implied in the ability to gain such experimental knowledge as he had noted and analyzed in his survey of the mind and its stores. The schools of Reid and Kant have given the prominence, which Locke neglected to assign, to this object of investigation in the prosecution of the theory of knowledge. The common sense of Reid is the object of Scottish inductive investigation; the categories of Kant of German formal criticism.

The philosophy of Sir William Hamilton is to a large extent a fusion of the spirit and doctrines of Reid and Kant, wrought by an independent and highly speculative mind, and adapted to the stage in the progress of the theory of knowledge which follows the last seventy years of German thinking. The philosophy of Reid was pointed against a scepticism that, as we shall afterwards show, was the result of representationalist experimentalism. The philosophy of Sir William Hamilton is fitted besides this to meet

the virtual scepticism of the German absolutists, by a demonstration of the necessary limitation of all possible human knowledge to what is relative and conditional. The old Scottish philosophy maintained, against those who deny that science is possible, the existence of a body of vital beliefs, which are sufficient to infuse reality into our knowledge. The new Scottish philosophy uses the original beliefs and notions of the mind, at once against the sceptics, and against the philosophers who arrogate to man a knowledge of the infinite and the absolute. In the eighteenth century the citadel of human knowledge, and the ultimate foundation of human action, was assailed by Hume, on the principles taught by Locke and adorned by Berkeley. In the nineteenth century the assault is conducted by Schelling, Hegel, and the Continental transcendentalists, on principles suggested by Kant and Fichte. These notes and dissertations are a refinement of our older national philosophy, and an expansion of its basis, fitted to adapt its doctrines to the rational defence of the knowledge that is gained by man, in his progress of inductive research along that via media between Pyrrhonism and Transcendentalism— extremes that virtually meet-which alone is open to him during his sojourn on this "isthmus of a middle state."

But we must be more defined in our account of this stage in the Cartesian revolution. For this purpose three central ideas. of the new Scottish Philosophy of Sir William Hamilton, selected from a host of others, presented in these notes and dissertations, which with their text embrace problems in the whole. circle of the sciences of metaphysics, logic, and morals, may be employed as the basis of the remaining part of this Article.

I. The theory of Common Sense, regarded as at once supporting and limiting human knowledge, which is developed in the first and most extended of the dissertations, and suggested in various of the footnotes throughout the work.

II. The theory of immediate or conscious external Perception, expounded in the four dissertations on "presentative and representative knowledge;" on "the various theories of external perception;" on "the distinction of the primary and secondary qualities of matter;" and on "perception proper and sensation proper." It is also referred to in the footnotes, especially those on the "Inquiry," and the second of the "Essays" on the intellectual powers.

III. The germs or scintillations of a theory of Free-will, or responsible agency, which are contained in the footnotes on Reid's essay on "the Liberty of moral agents."

* Materials sufficient to suggest thoughts for a separate artiele may be found in the notes on Reid's "Brief Account of Aristotle's Logic," which are remarkable for