OF KNOWLEDGE. 



379 



ridge, the revelations of which were brought together 

 by Carlyle, with cognate elements which Coleridge and 

 he discovered in German literature, produced in the 

 mind of Mill the impression of an actual reality, and 

 elicited from him, in spite of his cautious and un- 

 impassioned habit of mind, some very remarkable 

 admissions. 



Next to Mill and to those writers named above, all 

 of whom continued the tradition of the Baconian philo- Hamilton. 

 sophy, the thinker in this country who at that time 

 laboured most effectually at the problem of knowledge 

 was Sir William Hamilton ^ of Edinburgh. His writ- 



si. 



SirW. 



^ In point of time it would per- 

 haps be more correct to say that 

 the theorj- of knowledge in this 

 country was first distinctly put 

 forward as a special investigation 

 and the problem of knowledge 

 solved in a definite form by Sir 

 Wm. Hamilton in a series of 

 brilliant articles communicated to 

 the ' Edinburgh Review ' from 1829 

 to 1839. But the fact that they 

 appeared anonymously and were 

 moie critical than systematic, also 

 that they created what may be 

 called a new style in the philo- 

 sophical literature of this country, 

 prevented their due appreciation 

 till much later, when Hamilton 

 exerted a great personal influence 

 on Scottish and English thought 

 through his (posthumously pub- 

 lished) Lectures on 'Logic' and 

 ' Metaphysics ' at the Universitv of 

 Edinburgh from 1836 to 1856. The 

 late Prof. Veitch of Glasgow defines 

 Hamilton's conception of the philoso- 

 phical problem as follows : " Science 

 is knowledge — a form of knowledge. 

 Whence knowledge in this form ? 

 If we seek a cause of the fact of 

 experience, we may, nay must, 

 equally ask for a cause of our know- 



ing the fact. Knowledge has its 

 cause or source in what we call 

 mind, and it is possible only under 

 certain conditions. The primary 

 problem of philosophy is thus to 

 investigate the nature and necessary 

 conditions of knowledge,— the cim- 

 ditions of its own possibility. What 

 is knowledge ? and what are the 

 laws of knowledge ? Such is 

 Hamilton's conception of the prob- 

 lem of philosophy proper. Keeping 

 this in view, we can see how the 

 philosophy of Hamilton rises to its 

 highest question — that of the 

 nature of our knowledge of the 

 absolutely first or of the uncondi- 

 tioned. The line of causality in 

 finite things leads backwards and 

 upwards to the problem of an 

 ultimate or primary cause, and we 

 have the points — is this a necessity 

 of inference ? is it an object of 

 knowledge ? in what sense is it an 

 object of faith ? " (Veitch, ' Hamil- 

 ton ' in " Blackwood's Philosophical 

 Classics," 1882, p. 36, &c.) 



As to Hamilton's philosophical 

 antecedents Veitch says : " Even 

 in his youth he had gone far beyond 

 the range of reading in pliilosophy 

 then usual in Scotland. He han 



