380 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



ings, most of which appeared anonymously in the 

 ' Edinburgh Review,' date somewhat further back than 

 those of the Cambridge mathematicians, and formed in a 

 certain sense an opposition to the arguments employed 

 by what we may call the empirical school. At the 

 same time Hamilton's philosophy worked quite as 

 effectively in the direction of generating the agnostic 

 attitude of the succeeding period. Hamilton was as 

 much influenced by Reid's original refutation of Hume 

 as he was by Kant's ' Critique.' He believed quite as 

 strongly in the truthfulness of our sensuous experience as 

 he did in the relativity of all that we may call know- 

 ledge. To this latter doctrine he gave the name of 

 the Doctrine of the Conditioned, maintaining that all 

 that deserves the name of knowledge cannot rid itself 

 of its inherent conditional character. To possess know- 

 ledge meant, for him, to move in the region of the 



studied the ' Organon ' of Aristotle, 

 and had acquired a mastery of it 

 at an early age, rarely paralleled 

 at the close of the long and labori- 

 ous efforts of a lifetime. Even at 

 Oxford he knew it better than all 

 the tutors. He was familiar with 

 the principal schoolmen. . . . Des- 

 cartes and the Cartesian school had 

 been matter of minute investi- 

 gation ; and from Descartes he 

 gathered the ultimate principle in 

 his theory of knowledge, viz., the 

 subversion of doubt in the fact of 

 consciousness. He had mastered 

 German at a time when few people 

 in the country knew anything 

 about its literature or philosophy. 

 He had given a quite competent 

 attention to the ' Critique ' and to 

 the logical writings of Kant. He 

 had traced the course of subsequent 

 German speculation through Fichte, 

 Schelling, and Hegel, as his un- 



published notanda especially show. 

 The influence of Kant both upon 

 the cast of his thought and his 

 philosophical phraseology is marked 

 enough. In point of positive doc- 

 trine, however, the two men in Ger- 

 many he most nearly approached 

 were Jacobi and G. E. Schultze. 

 . . . When he made his first pub- 

 lished contribution to philosophy, 

 in the Essay on ' Cousin ' in the 

 ' Edinburgh Review ' of October 

 1829, the first impression, even 

 among people who professed some 

 philosophical knowledge, was that 

 of astonished bewilderment rather 

 than admiration or even apprecia- 

 tion. The Essay on ' Cousin ' dealt 

 with a question regarding the 

 reach and limits of human know- 

 ledge which was wholly new, in 

 form at least, to British specula- 

 tion " (ibid., p. 26). 



