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 children by his second wife, who died at Warrington House, Edinburgh, on 28 July 1838: a son George, who died in 1809, and a daughter Maria d'Arcy, who died unmarried in 1846.

Stewart's lectures produced an extraordinary effect in his own day. James Mill, though opposed to his philosophy, says that neither Pitt nor Fox, whose ‘most admired efforts’ he had heard, was ‘nearly so eloquent’ (, Correspondence, pp. 24, 27). Cockburn speaks of the beauty of his voice and the delicacy of his ear, and adds, ‘He was the finest reader I have ever heard.’ He was forced to clear his throat by an asthmatic tendency; but there was ‘eloquence in his very spitting.’ His manner, though slightly formal, became emotional at proper moments. ‘To me his lectures were like the opening of the heavens: I felt that I had a soul’ (Memorials, pp. 22–6). Cockburn's enthusiasm was shared by others. He remarks that Stewart's high personal character was one cause of the excellence of his oratory. It was clearly one cause of his great influence with the young men who lived in his house. Among the attendants upon Stewart's lectures on political economy were Sydney Smith, Francis Horner, Lord Webb Seymour, Jeffrey, Henry Erskine, Brougham, Sir A. Alison, and Lord Palmerston. Palmerston and J. W. Ward (afterwards Lord Dudley) lived in his house; and Lord Webb Seymour, Lord Henry Petty, and Lord John Russell were pupils, though not living with him (Works, vol. x. pp. liv, lviii). All the young Edinburgh reviewers were admirers. Jeffrey, in a review of his life of Reid, gave a sceptical turn to his argument, to which Stewart replied, to Jeffrey's satisfaction it is said, in the ‘Philosophical Essays’ (ib. v. 24). Horner was apparently his most reverent admirer. Sydney Smith, at whose country parsonage he was a visitor, speaks in the highest terms of his moral and literary merits, though considering him to be a ‘humbug’ in metaphysics as compared with Thomas Brown (, Sydney Smith, i. 24, 102, ii. 90, 134, 388). Scott, in spite of his toryism, is as emphatic as others upon Stewart's eloquence (Autobiographical Fragment); was encouraged by Stewart's approval of his early efforts, and, according to Lockhart (ch. vi.), kept up an affectionate intercourse through life.

Stewart's influence owed so much to his personal attractiveness that its decline is not surprising. He was a transmitter of Reid's influence far more than an originator. He held, with Reid, that philosophy depended upon psychology treated as an inductive science. He expounded the doctrine ‘common-sense’ so as to represent the ‘intuitionism’ against which the Mills carried on their polemic. He repudiated, however, ontological argument still more emphatically than his master, and was a thorough nominalist. While thus approximating to the purely empirical school, he was the more anxious, as Mackintosh observes (essay on Dugald Stewart in Ethical Philosophy, 1872, pp. 210–27), to mark his disapproval of more thoroughgoing advocates. He speaks with unusual severity of Hartley, Erasmus Darwin, and their English adherents, and of the French disciples of Condillac, while really making concessions to their doctrine. He was annoyed, therefore, by finding that Thomas Brown had attacked Reid most emphatically, and followed, if he had not plagiarised from, the French ‘ideologists’ Destutt De Tracy and Laromiguière. He spoke with unusual severity of Brown, whose life and lectures had been recently published, in a note to his ‘Elements’ (Works, iv. 375 &c.). Stewart, therefore, though he constantly shows real power and psychological acuteness, represents rather the decline than the development of a system of philosophy. ‘Without derogation from his writings,’ says Mackintosh, ‘it may be said that his disciples were among his best works.’ His ‘gentle and persuasive eloquence’ stimulated many hearers, and kept up a certain interest in philosophy. Mackintosh's high eulogies upon the eloquence of his style are probably just, as is his intimation that Stewart swells his volumes too freely ‘by expedients happily used to allure the young.’ Stewart is too much a professor of philosophical deportment. His reading was wide, but his knowledge of German philosophy stopped at Leibnitz; in his ‘Dissertation’ he confessed his inability to make anything of Kant, and filled the space with secondhand notices. A curious correspondence between him and Thomas Wirgman may be found in the account of Kant's philosophy published by Wirgman in the ‘Encyclopædia Londinensis’ in 1823. Wirgman, who was an enthusiastic expounder of Kant, had vainly appealed to Stewart to study the new system (in 1813), and Stewart pathetically apologises on the ground of age and ignorance of German for not undertaking the task.

Stewart's works are: 1. ‘Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind,’ vol. i. 1792 (6th edit. 1818); vol. ii. 1814 (4th edit. in 1822); vol. iii. 1827. The whole in vols. ii. iii. and iv. of ‘Works.’ 2. ‘Out-