Of all thinkers Hamilton is the least disposed to call any man master; still there were forces operating upon him and making his native tendencies take the particular direction which they did.I am convinced that a wholesome tone was given to his mind by the philosophy of Reid, the metaphysician of his native college, and who died six years after Hamilton was born.Had he been trained exclusively in Oxford, he might have spent his powers in mere notes and comments on others, and we should have been without his profound original observations.Had he been reared in Germany, his speculative spirit might have wasted itself in a hopelessly entangled dialectic, like that of Hegel.To Glasgow and to Reid he owes his disposition to appeal, even in the midst of his most abstract disquisitions, to consciousness and to facts.To Oxford we may trace his classical scholarship and his love of Aristotle, the favorite for long ages with technical Oxonian tutors.We only wish that he had been led to drink as deep into Plato as he did into Aristotle: it would have widened his sympathies, and rubbed off some acute angles of his mind, and made his philosophy less cold and negative.A third master mind exercised {426} as great a power over him as either Reid or Aristotle.In prosecuting his researches, he was necessarily led beyond the narrow scholarship of Britain into the wide field of German learning, and while ranging there could not but observe that there was a constant reference to the name of Kant.The logical power of the author of the "Critic of Pure Reason" at once seized his kindred mind, and he eagerly took hold of his critical method, and adopted many -- I think far too many of his distinctions.Kant exercised as great an influence over him as even Reid did.His whole philosophy turns round those topics which were discussed in Kant's great work; and he can never get out of those "forms " in which Kant set all our ideas so methodically, nor lose sight of those terrible antinomies, or contradictions of reason which Kant expounded, in order to show that the laws of pure reason can have no application to objects, and which Hegel gloried in and was employing as the ground principle of his philosophy.
From Kant he got the principle that the mine begins with phenomena instead of things, and builds thereon by forms or laws of thought; and it was as he pondered on the sphinx enigmas of Kant and Hegel, that he evolved his famous axiom about all positive thought lying in the proper conditioning of one or other of two contradictory propositions, one or other of which must, by the rule of excluded middle, be void.Fortunately he fell in, at the same time, with the less hard and more genial writings of Jacobi, who taught him that there was a faith element as well as a rational element in the human mind; but, unfortunately, Jacobi thought that faith was opposed to reason, and had no distinct views as to the nature of faith, or as to the harmony between faith and reason.To this source we may trace those appeals which Hamilton is ever making to faith, but without specifying what faith is.To his legal studies we may refer somewhat of his dry manner and his disputatious spirit.His readings in connection with the chair of history enabled him to realize the precise condition of the ages in which the opinions of philosophers were given forth.The catholic views which his extensive reading led him to adopt set him in determined opposition to the miserably narrow sensational school of France, and to Professor Mylne, of Glasgow, and Dr.Thomas Brown, who had given way too much to that school.The lofty {427} spiritual views which he had caught from Reid and Kant set him against materialism; and his medical studies, to which his father's profession may have directed him, enabled him to meet phrenology, and to give an admirable account of the physiology of the senses.Such was the course of training which he had gone through when he was asked to write a review of Cousin, and found himself face to face with the philosophy of the absolute.
In contemplating these two eminent philosophers, --Hamilton and Cousin, -- then brought into collision, it is difficult to say whether one is most struck with their resemblances or their differences.They are alike in respect of the fulness and the general accuracy of their scholarship.Both are alike distinguished for their historical knowledge and critical power.Even here, however, we may observe a contrast,-Cousin being the more universal in his sympathies, and Hamilton being the more discriminating and the more minutely accurate in his acquaintance with rare and obscure authors.Both, perhaps, might have had some of their views expanded, if, along with their scholarship, they had entered more thoroughly into the inductive spirit of modern physical researches.But the age of universal knowledge is past, and it is vain to expect that any human capacity will contain all learning.Both are original, vigorous, and independent thinkers; and both are distinguished by a catholic spirit in philosophy: but the one is more Platonic, and the other more Aristotelian, in his tastes and habits.The one delights to show wherein he agrees with all others, the other is more addicted to show wherein he differs from all others.Both are clear writers: