niversity of
Glasgow, had been plain "Dr. Hamilton." But they inherited, and Sir
William made good, the claim to a baronetcy which had been in abeyance
since the days of Robert Hamilton, the Covenanting leader. He himself
proceeded from Glasgow, with a Snell Exhibition, to Balliol in 1809. He
was called to the Scottish Bar, but never practised, though some
business came to him as Crown solicitor in the Court of Teinds (tithes).
He competed in 1820 for the Chair of Moral Philosophy, which Wilson,
with far inferior claims, obtained; but it is fair to say that at the
time the one candidate had given no more public proofs of fitness than
the other. Soon, however, he began to make his mark as a contributor of
philosophical articles to the _Edinburgh Review_, and in 1836 he
obtained a professorship in the University for which he was even better
fitted--that of Logic and Metaphysics. His lectures became celebrated,
but he never published them; indeed his only publication of any
importance during his lifetime was a collection of his articles under
the title of _Dissertations_, with the exception of his monumental
edition of Reid, on which he spent, and on which it has sometimes been
held that he wasted, most of his time. He died in 1856, and his lectures
were published after his death by his successor, Professor Veitch
(himself an enthusiastic devotee of literature, especially Border
literature, as well as of philosophy), and his greatest disciple,
Mansel, between 1859 and 1861. And this was how Mill's _Examination_
came to be posthumous. The "Philosophy of the Conditioned," as
Hamilton's is for shortness called, could not be described in any brief,
and perhaps not with propriety in any, space of the present volume. It
is enough to say that it was an attempt to reinforce the so-called
"Scotch Philosophy" of Reid against Hume by the help of Kant, as well as
at once to continue and evade the latter without resorting either to
Transcendentalism or to the experience-philosophy popular in England. In
logic, Hamilton was a great and justly honoured defender of the formal
view of the science which had been in persistent disrepute during the
eighteenth century; but some of the warmest lovers of logic doubt
whether his technical inventions or discoveries, such as the famous
Quantification of the Predicate, are more than "pretty" in the sense of
mathematicians and wine-merchants. This part of his doctrine, by the
way, attracted special at