Page:(1856) Scottish Philosophy—The Old and the New.pdf/15

Rh These traditional malignities are perfectly sickening to listen to. Parrots in their ignorance, but worse than parrots in their spite, those pests who screech such hereditary malice ought to be nailed flat against the door of every philosophical class-room in the kingdom. If Spinoza errs, it is in attributing, not certainly too much to the great Creator, for that is impossible, but too little to the creature of His hands. He denies, as many great and pious divines have done, the free agency of man: he asserts the absolute sovereignty of God. He is the very Calvin of philosophy.

Having felt myself under the necessity of making a few public explanations in reference to my philosophical position, in consequence of the suspicion or slur which, to some extent, may possibly have been thrown upon it by the recent unfavourable decision of the Town Council of Edinburgh, I have drifted inevitably into a somewhat personal strain. I may be pardoned if I continue my narrative, even at the risk of introducing details respecting the new philosophy, which are of no great public importance.

I repeat, then, that I disclaim for my philosophy the paternity either of Germany or Holland. I assert, that in every fibre it is of home growth and national texture; and I go on to speak of one to whom principally I owe the means which, next to my own efforts, have enabled me to approach, as I think, the pinnacles of truth.

Morally and intellectually, Sir William Hamilton was among the greatest of the great. I knew him in his glorious prime, when his bodily frame was like a breathing intellect, and when his soul could travel, as on eagles' wings, over the tops of all the mountains of knowledge. He seemed to have entered, as it were, by divine right, into the possession of all learning. He came to it like a fair inheritance, as a king comes to his throne. All the regions of literature were spread out before his view; all the avenues of science stood open at his command. A simpler and a grander nature never arose out of darkness into human life: a truer and a manlier character God never made. How plain, and yet how polished was his life, in all its ways—how refined, yet how robust and broad his intelligence, in all its