273 



HAMILTON, SIR WILLIAM. 



HAMILTON, SIR WILLIAM. 



274 



property, as well as amiable and agreeable character. It is said that 

 he was foster-brother to George III., which may account for his 

 appointment in 1764 to be English ambassador at Naples, whence he 

 was not recalled till 1800. His connection with the stirring events 

 born of the French revolution, more especially with the brilliant 

 exploits of Nelson in the Mediterranean, belong to the history of the 

 period. The master-spirit in that troubled time was bis second wife 

 (married to him in 1791), the fascinating but most unhappy Lady 

 Hamilton. [NELSON.] Sir William appears however to have main- 

 tained an unblemished character, except in the weak indulgence of 

 his wife. He was made a Knight of the Bath in 1771, and a privy- 

 councillor in 1791. His expenditure for special services at Naples 

 was disallowed by the ministry, and he died, much impoverished, in 

 England, April 6th 1803. 



Immediately after his arrival at Naples he applied himself diligently 

 to observe and record the volcanic phenomena of the neighbourhood ; 

 and the continued activity of Vesuvius from 1766 to 1771 gave him 

 excellent opportunity for these researches, of which his great work, 

 the ' Campi Phlegrsei,' Naples, 1776-77, 2 vols. fol., is a noble monu- 

 ment. It consists of a series of coloured plates, exhibiting the most 

 remarkable volcanic phenomena and the scenery of the most remark- 

 able spots with great vividness, accompanied by explanations in French 

 and English. Sir W. Hamilton published a ' Supplement ' to it in 

 1779, containing similar representations of the great eruption of 

 Vesuvius in August of that year. 



His collection of Qreek and Etruscan vases (now in the British 

 Museum) was very valuable : the foundation of them was laid by the 

 purchase of the Foreman collection at Naples in 1765. They gave 

 rise to that splendid work, ' Antiqui'cj Etrusques, Orecques, et 

 Komaines, tinte* da Cabinet de M. Hamilton,' 4 vols. fol., published at 

 Naples, the two first volumes iu 1766, the others at a later date. The 

 profit of the work was assigned to the editor D'Hancarville. Many 

 of the marbles now in the Townley Gallery of the British Museum 

 came from the collection of Sir W. Hamilton. (See 'Library of 

 Entertaining Knowledge, Townley Gallery,' voL ii., index.) 



Sir W. Hamilton took a lively interest in all subjects connected with 

 art or with antiquity, especially in the progress of the excavations at 

 Herculaneurn and Pompeii, and the formation of the Museum of 

 I'ortici. He was earnest in recommending to the Neapolitan govern- 

 ment the great work of unrolling the Herculaneum manuscripts, but 

 produced little effect on that most supine court. He himself bestowed 

 a part of his income upon this object. Ton papers of his composition, 

 upon matters observed during his abode in Italy, are printed iu the 

 ' Phil. Trans.' for the years 1767 to 1795 inclusive. His other works 

 are ' Observations on Mount Vesuvius, Mount Etna,' &c., London, 

 1772 ; and ' Lettera sul Monte Volture,' Naples, 1760. 



HAMILTON, SIK WILLIAM, as head of the old family of the 

 Hamiltons of Preston, in Haddingtonsbire, inherited a baronetcy 

 created in 1673, but for a time dormant. He was born on the 8th of 

 March 1788, in Glasgow, where his father, Dr. Hamilton, was a pro- 

 fessor in the university ; and there he received the earlier part of his 

 academical education. The Snell foundation of exhibitions in Balliol 

 College hag long been a prize for the more distinguished among the 

 Glasgow students : Adam Smith among others owed his English 

 education to it As a Snell exhibitioner Hamilton went to Oxford ; 

 and he took bis degree with honours as a first-class man, proceeding 

 afterwards to A.M. 



In 1813 he was admitted a member of the Scottish bar. But law, 

 except the Roman, did not receive much of his attention ; and the 

 only practice he ever had was the very little which became incumbent 

 on him, when, after a time, he was appointed crown solicitor of teinds 

 or tithes. Even while a very young man, he had acquired no small 

 part of his singular and varied stock of knowledge ; and mental 

 philosophy began early to be his favourite pursuit On the death of 

 Thomas Brown, in 1820, he stood for the professorship of Moral 

 Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh : but Mr. Wilson was the 

 successful candidate. Next year, on the nomination of the bar, he 

 became Professor of Universal History in the same university. This 

 appointment, little more than nominal in respect of emoluments, was 

 hardly better as to the performance of duty. The department is not 

 in any way imperative on students; and it never commanded pupils 

 unless for a while under the elder Tytler. Sir William, being, though 

 not rich, yet independent of professional drudgery, was left, undis- 

 turbed and undiverted, to the prosecution of his studies and specula- 

 tions. It was long before these bore fruits visible to any but his im- 

 mediate friends. For the digesting of his thoughts he was nearly as 

 independent of the necessity of writing, as his iron memory made him 

 to bo for the preservation of his knowledge ; and he seems to have 

 long shrunk from the toil of endeavouring to expound ideas, for which 

 he did not hope to find an apt or sympathising audience. It was only, 

 as he himself has declared, on the pressing request of the editor of 

 the 'Edinburgh Review,' that be was induced, in 1829, to give to that 

 periodical the first of a series of contributions, which closed in 1839, 

 and which unfortunately constitutes us yet by much the larger propor- 

 tion of hi. i published writings. Those papers exhibit tho variety of 

 hU learning not less than its depth ; and the philosophical essays which 

 were among them speedily found readers, who, if few, were competent 

 to do them justice, i 

 Bloo. mv. VOL. in. 



In 1836 he found his right place : he was appointed by the town 

 council of Edinburgh, though not without a contest, to be Professor of 

 Logic and Metaphysics in the University. He was, what very few of the 

 Scottish professors holding offices thus designated have been, at home 

 in both of the spheres indicated by the official title. The vngue term 

 which stands second, opened up to him in his teaching any walk he 

 might choose to tread in the vast field of mental philosophy, of which he 

 had probably in his studies traversed more than any other man then or 

 now alive. The first title pointed his way to one special mental science, 

 which he had studied in all its existing shapes, and which ho now set 

 about systematising in harmony with new lights that had dawned on 

 his own mind. Instead of following the usual professurial practice, of 

 combining the whole matter of his instructions into one course of 

 lectures, to be delivered in one and the same session (a term of six 

 months in each year), he lectured alternately in the one named section 

 and in the other iu Logic one year, in Metaphysics the next; and he 

 had the gratification of defeating, after a whimsical squabble, an 

 attempt of the town council, who are the legal administrators of that 

 university, to force him into the common practice. His reputation and 

 his influence now extended rapidly. Long before 1836, he had become 

 celebrated in the learned circles of Germany, and had begun to bo 

 known and estimated by many at home : the most cmineut foreigu 

 thinkers had concurred with not a few of our own, in pressing earnestly 

 the pre-eminence of his claim to the Logic chair ; and in England, as 

 well as in Scotland, philosophical speculators discovered more and 

 more plainly that, in those fragmentary treatises of his, there had been 

 opened veins of thought which thinking men durst not leave untested. 

 His teaching, again, now worked energetically ou many young aud ardent 

 spirits gathered round him iu his lecture-room. There is not evidence 

 indeed that his logical lectures have as yet had much effect on his 

 personal pupils. But the metaphysical lectures excited a keen interest 

 in philosophy among all of his students who were qualified for severe 

 abstract thinking ; while they guided the thinking of not a few into 

 channels in which it long or always continued to flow. He was, too, 

 not less anxious in encouraging and directing for the young men wide 

 philosophical reading, than in prompting them to active philosophical 

 reflection and reasoning. 



Sir William's studies seem to have been conducted, thenceforth, with 

 a steadier view than before to systematic exposition and publication. 

 Still the labour proceeded slowly. Academic business, and other 

 temporary occasions of controversy, were somewhat too apt to inter- 

 rupt the progress of one who was armed for warfare less ignoble. 

 Among other things, he, himself a Presbyterian, published a pamphlet 

 on the schism which split the Church of Scotland in 1843. Very soon, 

 likewise, after that year, his health began to fail ; aud paralysis struck 

 the right side of his body from head to foot He was for a timo 

 utterly disabled from teaching, and was afterwards able to lecture 

 only with frequent assistance. But the vigour, both of intellect and 

 of will, was as unimpaired as it had been with Dugald Stewart under a 

 similar calamity. His reading and thinking were still carried on ; even 

 his writing was BO, not without very much aid from others. That more 

 of his large designs were not executed, is a fact for which there were thus, 

 in his latest years, but too sorrowful reasons. He had long worked at 

 intervals on that which he had set himself as his first task, the annotat* 

 ing of the works of Thomas Reid. He aimed at showing the relations 

 of Reid's system, both to older philosophical opinions on the one 

 hand, and also to newer ones, especially to Hamilton's own metaphysical 

 doctrines doctrines which he himself always regarded, and firmly 

 and thankfully represented, as having their essential germ and 

 foundation in Reid, and as being merely a development of the ' com- 

 mon sense ' philosophy to results made possible by a combination of 

 scholastic and German methods. Sir William^ Hamilton's annotated 

 edition of ' The Works of Dr. Thomas Reid ' appeared in 1846, much of 

 it having been printed long before. But all that has been published 

 down to this date (1856)leavesitlamentably incomplete. Onnotafew 

 problems of deep interest on not a few also beariug closely on our 

 comprehension of Hamilton's own system of thought, we are left with 

 references, in foot-notes, to supplementary dissertations, of which not a 

 word is yet given us ; and a dissertation asserting his own peculiar 

 theory of the Association of Ideas is broken off abruptly at the end of 

 the volume. In 1852 appeared the first edition of a reprint, with large 

 additions, of his periodical articles ' Discussions ou Philosophy aud 

 Literature, Education and University Reform chiefly from the Edin- 

 burgh Review.' Translations of several of the essays had previously 

 been made into French, Italian, aud German ; 1'eisse's French transla- 

 tion and notes are particularly valuable. Sir William's regard for the 

 Scottish school in philosophy next showed itself, not (unluckily) in 

 the completion of his 'Reid,' and those further developments of his 

 own doctrines which he had there promised, but in a tribute to tho 

 memory of another of its celebrated masters, from whom he had neither 

 derived, nor professed to derive, much if anything in his own opinions. 

 He undertook to edite, with notes, the collected works of Dugald 

 Stewart. The publication, begun in 1854, is still uncompleted; and 

 nothing has appeared of the biography which was to introduce it. In 

 1855, when in country-quarters, Sir William suffered fracture of a limb ; 

 and he died in Edinburgh on the 6th of May 1856. He has left a widow 

 and family. The manuscripts of his lectures, in both divisions, are said 

 to be iu such a state, that they may easily be prepared for the press. 



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