162 MEMOIR OF AUGUSTUS BE MORGAN. 



1847. journal so widely circulated as the Athenceum, lias caused 

 Hamilton. man y students of Logic to hear or read something.' He 

 himself was a mathematical Logician. Sir William's 

 philosophy might be called poetical. I have heard his 

 pupils speak of him as ' inspired ; ' and the clear mental 

 sight which enabled the one to develop the doctrine of 

 limits in the Differential Calculus was more at home in the 

 quantification of parts of the syllogism than the genius 

 which enabled the other to bring out his admirable 

 analysis of cause and effect. After Sir William's death 

 Mr. De Morgan wrote an obituary notice of him in the 

 Athenceum, in which his intellectual powers and great 

 research were set forth so luminously as to excite wonder 

 in persons not acquainted with the writer's character. 1 



1 Readers of Mr. Herbert Spencer's volume on Sociology may 

 have been puzzled by a passage (p. 412) in which the subject of this 

 memoir appears to be accused of a misquotation, in his own interest, 

 of some matter relating to priority of Logical discovery. It runs as 

 follows : 



One further point only will I name. Professor Baynes says: 'Professor De 

 Morgan's emphatic rejection of Mr. Bentham's claim after examining the relevant 

 chapters of his "outline" is in striking contrast to Mr. Herbert Spencer's easy- 

 going acceptance of it.' Now, though to many readers this will seem a telling 

 comparison, yet to those who know that Professor De Morgan was one of the 

 parties to the controversy, and had his own claims to establish, the comparison will 

 not seem so telling. To me, however, and to many who have remarked the 

 perversity of Professor De Morgan's judgments, his verdict on the matter, even 

 were he perfectly unconcerned, will go for but little. Whoever will take the 

 trouble to refer to the Atheneeum, November 5, 1864, p. 600, and after reading a 

 sentence which he there quotes, will look at either the title of the chapter it is 

 taken from or the sentence which succeeds it, will be amazed that such recklessness 

 of misrepresentation should be shown by a conscientious man, and will be there- 

 after but little inclined to abide by Professor De Morgan's authority in matters 

 like that here in question. 



The reader who ' takes the trouble ' to search out the passage in 

 this Athenaeum a quarter of a century old will not find a ' matter like 

 that here in question/ But he will be enabled to form a juster estimate 

 of the above passage when he learns that the victim of Professor De 

 Morgan's inaccuracy or unconscientiousness was neither Bentham nor 

 Hamilton, but Mr. Herbert Spencer himself. 



The quotation itself occurs in a brief notice of Mr. Spencer's 

 Principles of Biology, which I here reprint in full : 



This is one of two volumes, and the two but part of a larger work : we can 



