THE

METAPHYSICS

OF

SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON,

COLLECTED, arranged, AND ABRIDGED,

FOR THE USE OF COLLEGES AND PRIVATE STUDENTS,

BY

o.c.

FRANCIS BOWEN,

ALFORD PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY IN HARVARD COLLEGE.

CAMBRIDGE:

SEVER AND FRANCIS.

1861.

༠

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

CAMBRIDGE:

Allen and Farnham, Stereotypers and Printers.

PREFACE.

IT is unfortunate that Sir William Hamilton did not undertake fully to digest his metaphysical opinions into system, and to publish them as one orderly and connected whole. He had a system, for he was eminently a methodical and self-consistent thinker; but it was built up piecemeal, and so given to the world, at various times, in successive articles in the Edinburgh Review; in copious notes, appendices, and other additions to these articles when they were republished as a volume of "Discussions," and again, when these "Discussions" passed to a second edition; in the Notes, and, still more at length, in the Supplementary Dissertations, to his ponderous edition of Reid; and finally, in the memoranda prepared at different times and for various purposes, which his English editors gathered up and annexed to the posthumous publication of his "Lectures on Metaphysics.' While neither of these works furnishes an outline of his system as a whole, each one of them contains a statement, more or less complete, of his principal doctrines and arguments, so that, taken together, they abound in repetitions. Even the "Lectures," which afford the nearest approach to a full and systematic exposition of his opinions, besides laboring under the necessary disadvantage of a posthumous publication, never finally revised by the author for the press, and probably not even intended by him to be printed, were first written by him in great haste at the time (1836) of his original appointment to a Professorship in the University of Edinburgh, and seem to have received but few subsequent alterations or additions, though his opinions certainly underwent afterwards considerable development and modification.

As any course of instruction in the Philosophy of Mind

at the present day must be very imperfect which does not comprise a tolerably full view of Hamilton's Metaphysics, I have endeavored, in the present volume, to prepare a text-book which should contain, in his own language, the substance of all that he has written upon the subject. For this purpose, the "Lectures on Metaphysics" have been taken as the basis of the work; and I have freely abridged them by striking out the repetitions and redundancies in which they abound, and omitting also, in great part, the load of citations and references that they contain, as these are of inferior interest except to a student of the history of philosophy, or as marks of the stupendous erudition of the author. The space acquired by these abridgments has enabled me to interweave into the book, in their appropriate place and connection, all those portions of the "Discussions," and of the Notes and Dissertations supplementary to Reid, which seemed necessary either to elucidate and confirm the text, or to supplement it with the later and more fully expressed opinions of the author. These insertions, always distinguished by angular brackets [ ], and referred to the source whence they were drawn, are very numerous and considerable in amount; sometimes they are several pages long, others do not exceed in length a single paragraph, or even a single sentence. The author's language has invariably been preserved, and whereever a word or two had to be altered or supplied, to preserve the connection, the inserted words have been enclosed in brackets. The divisions between the Lectures, necessarily arbitrary, as the limits of a discourse of fixed length could not coincide with the natural division of the subject, have not been preserved in this edition. A chapter here often begins in the middle of a Lecture, and sometimes comprises two or more Lectures. A very few notes, critical or explanatory in character, are properly distinguished as supplied by the American Editor.

It has been a laborious, but not a disagreeable task, to examine and collate three bulky octavos, with a view thus to condense their substance into a single volume of moderate dimensions. I cannot promise that the work has been thoroughly, but only that it has been carefully, done.