Excerpt from The Southern Literary Messenger, Vol. 29: Devoted to Every Department of Literature and the Fine Arts That modern philosophy begins with David Home is universally admitted; that it ends with Sir William Hamilton will not be allowed by those who see in his system only a new line of railway to infidelity, but it is firmly maintained by a majority of his pupils, and by most of those who profess to have mastered his method. Unfortunately, it is not very easy to scrape an acquaintance with that method. A great thinker and an incessant reader, Sir William Hamilton had a mortal hatred of the pen. His prodigious learning was utterly unable to crush bis power of thought, but learning and thought combined to cripple the faculty of composition. If ever he made a remark his erudition reminded him that a thousand previous remarks had been made which had some relation to his own, and he could not resist the opportunity of tracing the stream of thought from age to age, until finally it welled up in a particular form into his own consciousness. Then he must not only trace the history of the idea, he must also trace the history of the words in which it was conveyed, and attack somebody in passing for a curious mistake as to the language of the Aristotelians, this mistake being a signal proof of the degradation of the particular University to which the sinner belongs, and a capital excuse for digressing into a discussion of University training in general. While he was thus hampered in the act of composition by the suggestions of a too abtrusive memory, he was also hampered by the demands of a too exacting thought. He never could look at a subject from the one point of view which suited his present purpose without first of all analyzing all the possible modes of looking at it, making a philosophical genuflexion to every point of the intellectual compass, and explaining why every one of these in turn must be rejected in order that we may trim our sails to the glowing west. In every topic he saw a universe of thought; in every atom of life the microcosm of existence; and he was always striving to compress a library into an essay, a system into a sentence. The thing was impossible. His ideal of composition was extravagant, and so utterly beyond human attainment that he threw aside his pen in despair, and never wrote except on compulsion. His writing almost always took the form of criticism, which is of itself fragmentary. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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