sophy must be gained for ourselves and by ourselves. It implies a personal quest, and a personal conquest. This is the key to its power and its discipline. But I am prepared to say this, that the school of Scottish Philosophy has represented nationality in thought and feeling; it is sprung from the soil as much as the poetry of Scotland is native born; it is instinct with the spirit of the cautious, sober, circumspect, yet profoundly reflective and analytic turn, of the best type of the Scottish mind. In its origin and main features it has no marks about it of a foreign importation, often as sickly as it is soulless; it is a genuine attempt by genuine men and honest effort to find solutions of the ever-pressing questions of our lives, human personality, freedom, immortality, the nature and meaning of the external world, the nature and meaning of God Himself, and of our relations to Him. And no student of philosophy, no historian of philosophy, can either fairly or intelligently pass by the contribution which Scotland has made to the great science of Mental Philosophy. Any method of philosophising which shall lead a man to do this, is an arbitrary and an arrogant one, grounded neither on the facts of history nor the warrant of reason.

I must in this connection emphasise two facts: the one, that independent speculative thought in Scotland. was really contemporaneous with the breaking up of the regenting system and the institution of the professorial; and the other, that the philosophy of Scotland was born, grew up, and was nourished in the universities of the country. The regenting system is essentially the system of teaching which has prevailed, and which now prevails,

in Oxford and Cambridge. It is a system which lives. and has always lived on books and text-books, written by others, and so provided for its use. It looks to preparation for examination and graduation merely, or at least mainly. It lives, in fact, on the scraps which fall from other men's tables. It has given rise to no independent course of thinking, to no school of philosophy, either in Oxford or Cambridge. Nay, the exception in this case proves the rule; for the period in Cambridge during which there was an outcome of independent thinking sufficient to be named a school, the epoch of the middle of the seventeenth century, illustrious by the names of Henry More and Ralph Cudworth, to say nothing of Gale, Burnet, Cumberland, and Culverwell, was a time in which the professorial overshadowed the tutorial or regenting element in the university. More and Cudworth remained practically all their lives as Fellows of Christ Church, and they were lecturing professors in the Scottish sense of the term, never accepting ecclesiastical preferment. These are facts worthy of the consideration of university reformers, or at least innovators in our own time. They are worth considering in connection with the legitimate influence of the two opposing systems, the tutorial and the professorial, which have substantially characterised the universities of England and Scotland.

I must further emphasise the fact that the free speculative thought of Scotland was born in the universities of the country; for we must go back to Carmichael and especially to Francis Hutcheson in Glasgow for its true origin. Hutcheson was appointed to the Chair of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow in 1729, exactly two years after

the old regenting system had been broken up in that university. This important fact regarding the origin of speculative thought in our country, has not escaped the keen eye of Cousin. It is almost peculiar to Scotland. In France the free thought of the country was represented by Descartes and Malebranche, in Holland by Spinoza, in England by Locke, followed by Collins and Dodwell: not one of them men identified with the universities of their country, rather out of sympathy with them. Why this was so, why free speculative thought about the fundamental questions of metaphysics, morals, and theology, originated and was continued in the universities of this country, may be explained partly by the fact that the men in the universities represented the freedom, the individualism which undoubtedly characterised the Presbyterianism of the time, as against Episcopacy and the dogmatism of Church authority; partly also by the apparently natural and historical tendency of the Scottish intellect to reasoning and discussion on first principles. That Scottish speculative thought was a product of the universities, that it was given first to a body of students in the way of lectures, and not in the form of books for the world, may serve to explain its moderation, some people would say its timidity, on purely speculative questions; certainly to explain the simple, untechnical style in which it is for the most part clothed.

I cannot here notice all even of the main features of the Scottish school of thought. But I must notice one which is intimately connected with the impulse which helped to give it birth, I mean its attitude to political freedom. An unswerving declaration in favour of polit

ical liberty has been the feature of the system and the men, since its first uprising. In the hands of Carmichael and Hutcheson, Scottish thought was a reaction, a protest, against two sets of doctrines, that of Hobbes, and that of Locke, the latter, at least, as interpreted by Collins and Dodwell. It revolted against the despotic principles of Hobbes, and in this it represented thoroughly the national feeling; for the country had had enough of uncontrolled despotic power in the time of Charles II., the Lauderdales and the Middletons, who had carried out the unrelenting behests successively of a sensualist and a concealed Papist on the throne. We are apt to forget in these times what we owe to the Scottish philosophy and the teaching of the Scottish universities in our most intimate social condition. It has been the strongest ally of the spirit of freedom in this country. Thomas Reid, not less than Burke and Wordsworth, hailed with fervour the early promise of the recognition of the rights of a nation in the dawn of the French Revolution. And out of the silent thought matured in the Scottish universities arose that system of free political economy which ranked Adam Smith for its master, Dugald Stewart for its eloquent expounder, and Russell, Palmerston, Horner, and Lauderdale for its practical disciples.

While Scottish thought has been true to the cause of political freedom, it has been, at the same time, always opposed to the excess, the licence, of individual opinion. It has sought ever to put in the foreground the convictions at the heart of humanity, those beliefs which give it true dignity. It has held by these against passing individual assault and criticism, against indi

vidual conceit and caprice; it has held by freedom against fatalism, a disinterested theory of morals against selfishness, and a rational theism. If the poetry of Burns may be described, as I think it may, as commonsense glorified, the philosophy of Scotland may be characterised as the common-sense of mankind analysed, purified, and vindicated.

II. HAMILTON-LIFE AND WRITINGS.

DR THOMAS REID was still alive in a ripe and honoured old age in the College Court of Glasgow, when William Hamilton, the son of a professor there, was born in the same Court in 1788. His immediate ancestors were professors of medicine. But there lurked somewhat obscurely the fact that his more remote forefathers had been lairds, knights, baronets; had held estates, Preston, Fingalton, Airdrie; that they were a very old branch of the house of Hamilton. They had fought, and some of them had fallen, at Flodden, Langside, and Worcester. A very near ancestor had been fired with the Covenanting spirit; he defeated Claverhouse at Drumclog, and subsequently was beaten at Bothwell Brig. Hamilton's mother, too, an Elizabeth Stirling, was of a good old line, the Stirlings of Cadder. This descent had a strong fascination for him; the historical imagination was a powerful element in his nature and work; it largely moulded all his philosophical labours and thought, and it quickened him, in the early years of his youth and manhood, to special inquiry into the history of his own line. The result was that