THE METAPHYSICS OF SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON, COLLECTED, ARRANGED, AND ABRIDGED, FOR THE USE OF COLLEGES AND PRIVATE STUDENTS, BY FRANCIS BOWEN, ALFORD PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY IN HARVARD COLLEGE. CAMBRIDGE: Phil2035.51 1875, Noarch 22. Halter Bequest. HARVARD UNI LIBRARY Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1861, by SEVER AND FRANCIS, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. CAMBRIDGE: Allen and Farnham, Stereotypers and Printers. 5616 51.414 14 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 |