us
Bostrom protests not only against empiricism but also against those
doctrines of Christian theology which seemed to him to picture God as
something less than Pure Spirit. In ethics the highest aim is the
direction of actions by reason in harmony with the Divine; so the
state, like the individual, exists solely in God, and in its most
perfect form consists in the harmonious obedience of all its members to
a constitutional monarch; the perfection of mankind as a whole is to be
sought in a rational orderly system of such states in obedience to
Universal Reason. This system differs from Platonism in that the "ideas"
of God are not archetypal abstractions but concrete personalities.

Bostrom's writings were edited by H. Edfeldt (2 vols., Upsala, 1883).
For his school see SWEDEN: _Literature_; also H. Hoffding, _Filosofien
i Sverig_ (German trans. in _Philos. Monatsheften_, 1879), and
_History of Mod. Philos._ (Eng. trans., 1900), p. 284; R. Falckenberg,
_Hist. of Phil._ (Eng. trans., 1895); A. Nyblaeus, _Om den Bostromske
filosofien_ (Lund, 1883), and _Karakteristik af den Bostromska
filosofien_ (Lund, 1892).

BOSWELL, JAMES (1740-1795), Scottish man of letters, the biographer of
Samuel Johnson, was born at Edinburgh on the 29th of October 1740. His
grandfather was in good practice at the Scottish bar, and his father,
Alexander Boswell of Auchinleck, was also a noted advocate, who, on his
elevation to the supreme court in 1754, took the name of his Ayrshire
property as Lord Auchinleck. A Thomas Boswell (said upon doubtful
evidence to have been a minstrel in the household of James IV.) was
killed at Flodden, and since 1513 the family had greatly improved its
position in the world by intermarriage with the first Scots nobility. In
contradiction to his father, a rigid Presbyterian Whig, James was "a
fine boy, wore a white cockade, and prayed for King James until his
uncle Cochrane gave him a shilling to pray for King George, which he
accordingly did" ("Whigs of all ages are made in the same way" was
Johnson's comment). He met one or two English boys, and acquired a
"tincture of polite letters" at the high school in Edinburgh. Like R.L.
Stevenson, he early frequented society such as that of the actors at the
Edinburgh theatre, sternly disapproved of by his father. At the
university, where he was constrained for a season to study civil law, he
met William Johnson Temple, his future friend and correspondent