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 itinerating libraries, and grandson of John Brown, author of the Self-Interpreting Bible. In 1832 he entered the university of Edinburgh, where, after studying in Berlin and St Petersburg, he graduated as M.D. in 1839. About 1840 he was engaged in experiments by which he sought to prove that “carbon in certain states of combination is susceptible of conversion into silicon,” and his failure to establish this proposition had much to do with his want of success as a candidate for the chair of chemistry at Edinburgh in 1843. He held the doctrine that the chemical elements are compounds of equal and similar atoms, and might therefore possibly be all derived from one generic atom. In 1850 he published a tragedy, Galileo Galilei, and two volumes of his Lectures on the Atomic Theory and Essays Scientific and Literary appeared in 1858, with a preface by his kinsman Dr John Brown, the author of Horae Subsecivae. He died at Edinburgh on the 20th of September 1856.

BROWN, THOMAS (1663–1704), English satirist, of “facetious memory” as Addison designates him, was the son of a farmer at Shifnal, in Shropshire, and was born in 1663. He was entered in 1678 at Christ Church, Oxford, where he is said to have escaped expulsion by the famous lines beginning, “I do not love thee, Dr Fell.” He was for three years schoolmaster at Kingston-on-Thames, and afterwards settled in London. Under the pseudonym of Dudly Tomkinson he wrote a satire on Dryden, The Reasons of Mr Bays changing his Religion: considered in a Dialogue between Crites, Eugenius and Mr Bays, with two other parts having separate titles (1688–1690, republished with additions in 1691). He was the author of a great variety of poems, letters, dialogues and lampoons, full of humour and erudition, but coarse and scurrilous. His writings have a certain value for the knowledge they display of low life in London. He died on the 16th of June 1704, and was buried in the cloister of Westminster Abbey.

BROWN, THOMAS (1778–1820), Scottish philosopher, was born at Kirkmabreck, Kirkcudbright, where his father was parish clergyman. He was a boy of a refined nature, a wide reader and an eager student. Educated at several schools in London, he went to Edinburgh University in 1792, where he attended Dugald Stewart’s moral philosophy class. His attendance was desultory, and he does not appear to have completed his arts course. After studying law for a time he took up medicine; his graduation thesis De Somno was well received. But his great strength lay in metaphysical analysis, as was shown in his answer to the objections raised against the appointment of Sir John Leslie to the mathematical professorship (1805). Leslie, a follower of Hume, was attacked by the clerical party as a sceptic and an infidel, and Brown took the opportunity to defend Hume’s doctrine of causality as in no way inimical to religion. His defence, at first only a pamphlet, became in its third edition a lengthy treatise entitled Inquiry into the Relation of Cause and Effect, and is a fine specimen of Brown’s analytical faculty. In 1806 he became a medical practitioner in partnership with James Gregory, but, though successful in his profession, preferred literature and philosophy. After twice failing in the attempt to gain a professorship in the university, he was invited, during an illness of Dugald Stewart in the session of 1808–1809, to act as his substitute, and during the following session he undertook a great part of Stewart’s work. The students received him with enthusiasm, due partly to his splendid rhetoric and partly to the novelty and ingenuity of his views. In 1810 he was appointed as colleague to Stewart, a position which he held for the rest of his life. He wrote his lectures at high pressure, and devoted much time to the editing and publication of the numerous poems which he had written at various times during his life. He was also engaged in preparing an abstract of his lectures as a handbook for his class. His health, never strong, gave way under the strain of his work. He was advised to take a voyage to London, where he died on the 2nd of April 1820.

His friend and biographer, David Welsh (1793–1845), superintended the publication of his text-book, the Physiology of the Human Mind, and his Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind was published by his successors, John Stewart and the Rev. E. Milroy. The latter was received with great enthusiasm both in England (where it reached its 19th edition) and in America; but recent criticism has lessened its popularity and it is now almost forgotten.

Brown’s philosophy occupies an intermediate place between the earlier Scottish school and the later analytical or associational psychology. To the latter Brown really belonged, but he had preserved certain doctrines of the older school which were out of harmony with his fundamental view. He still retained a small quantum of intuitive beliefs, and did not appear to see that the very existence of these could not be explained by his theory of mental action. This intermediate or wavering position accounts for the comparative neglect into which his works have now fallen. They did much to excite thinking, and advanced many problems by more than one step, but they did not furnish a coherent system, and the doctrines which were then new have since been worked out with greater consistency and clearness.

Brown wrote a criticism of Darwin’s Zoonomia (1798), and was one of the first contributors to the Edinburgh Review, in the second number of which he published a criticism of the Kantian philosophy, based entirely on Villers’s French account of it. Among his poems, which are modelled on Pope and Akenside and rather commonplace, may be mentioned: Paradise of Coquettes (1814); Wanderer in Norway (1815); Warfiend (1816); Bower of Spring (1817); Agnes (1818); Emily (1819); a collected edition in 4 vols. appeared in 1820.

BROWN, THOMAS EDWARD (1830–1897), British poet, scholar and divine, was born on the 5th of May 1830, at Douglas, Isle of Man. His father, the Rev. Robert Brown, held the living of St Matthew’s—a homely church in a poor district. His mother came of Scottish parentage, though born in the island. Thomas, the sixth of ten children, was but two years old when the family removed to Kirk Braddan vicarage, a short distance from Douglas, where his father (a scholar of no university, but so fastidious about composition that he would have some sentences of an English classic read to him before answering an invitation) took share with the parish schoolmaster in tutoring the clever boy until, at the age of fifteen, he was entered at King William’s College. Here his abilities soon declared themselves, and hence he proceeded to Christ Church, Oxford, where his position (as a servitor) cost him much humiliation, which he remembered to the end of his life. He won a double first, however, and was elected a fellow of Oriel in April 1854, Dean Gaisford having refused to promote him to a senior studentship of his own college, on the ground that no servitor had ever before attained to that honour. Although at that time an Oriel fellowship conferred a deserved distinction, Brown never took kindly to the life, but, after a few terms of private pupils, returned to the Isle of Man as vice-principal of his old school. He had been ordained deacon, but did not proceed to priest’s orders for many years. In 1857 he married his cousin, Miss Stowell, daughter of Dr Stowell of Ramsey, and soon afterwards left the island once more to become headmaster of the Crypt school, Gloucester —a position which in no long time he found intolerable. From Gloucester he was summoned by the Rev. John Percival (afterwards bishop of Hereford), who had recently been appointed to the struggling young foundation of Clifton College, which he soon raised to be one of the great public schools. Percival wanted a master for the modern side, and made an appointment to meet Brown at Oxford; “and there,” he writes, “as chance would have it, I met him standing at the corner of St Mary’s