In October 1810, our eminent countryman, Mr. James Wardrop, communicated to Mr. Stewart an account of a very remarkable youth, James Mitchell, who was born both blind and deaf, and who consequently de rived all his knowledge of external objects from the senses of touch, taste, and smell. Mr. Stewart was delighted with the prospect which this case afforded of establishing the distinction between the original and the acquired perceptions of sight. This expec tation was not realized; but Mr. Stewart collected all the facts regarding the remarkable youth, and em bodied them in a highly interesting memoir, which was read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh in the beginning of 1812. It is entitled " Some account of a Boy born Blind and Deaf, collected from authentic sources of information, with a few remarks and com ments;" and was published in the seventh volume of the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In consequence of the interest which was excited by this communication, Mr. Stewart was anxious that Mitchell should be brought to Edinburgh, and educated under the superintendance of persons capable of studying the development of his mental powers. He accord ingly submitted this idea to the council of the Royal Society, who entered eagerly into the plan, and re solved to apply to Government for a small pension to enable Miss Mitchell and her brother to reside near Edinburgh. Lord 'Webb Seymour, one of the Vice Presidents of the Society, transmitted the wishes of the council to the Earl of Liverpool, then first Lord of the Treasury. The Prime Minister of Great Britain not only refused to science and humanity the small pittance which was craved, but ventured to strengthen the ground of his refusal, by expressing a aloubt whether the object which the Society had in view was likely to add to the comfort of the unfor tunate object of their patronage. The writer of these lines was one of the five members of council to whom this answer was read, and he will never forget the im pression which it made upon the meeting—the sup pressed feeling of mortification and shame which was visible on every countenance. The guardian of the British treasury was entitled to refuse the application which had been made to him, but he had no right to question the humanity by which that application was dictated. The character of Mr. Dug-ald Stewart should have been a sufficient guarantee that the per sonal comfort and happiness of Mitchell would be the first objects of his solicitude.
In the year 1813, Mr. Stewart published the second volume of his Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind. This volume relates entirely to Reason or the Understanding, properly so called, and as the author himself observes, the subjects of which it treats are of necessity peculiarly dry and abstruse; but he regarded them as so important, that he laboured the whole of the materials which compose it with the greatest care and diligence. In the fourth chapter he treats more particularly of the method of inquiry pointed out in the Noeum Organum of Bacon, and he has directed the attention of his readers chiefly to such questions as are connected with the theory of our intellectual faculties, and the primary sources of experimental knowledge in the laws of the human frame.
In the month of January 1822, Mr. Stewart expe rienced a stroke of palsy, which considerably im paired his powers of speech, and unfitted him in a great degree for the enjoyment of general society. Unable to take regular exercise, or to use his right band, he was reduced to a state of great dependence on those round him. The faculties of his mind, however, were in no respect impaired by this severe attack, and with the assistance of his only daughter, who acted as his amanuensis, and who understood his imperfect articulation, he was enabled to prepare his works for publication with an ardour of mind and a freshness of intellect which formed a striking contrast with his bodily weakness.
Although the progress of his great work was inter rupted by his Dissertation on the progress of Meta physical and Ethical Philosophy, which he composed for the Supplement to the Encyclopedia Britannica, yet he was able to complete the third volume of his Philosophy of the Human Mind in 1827. This volume contains a continuation of the second part, viz. two chapters, one on Language, and the other on the Principles or Law of Sympathetic Imitation ; and also the third part, which consists of two chapters, one on the Varieties of Intellectual Character, and the other a Comparison between the Faculties. of Man and those of
the Lower Animals. To this last chapter he h as added as an appendix, his account of James Mitchell, with a supplement containing a recent account of the manners and habits of this interesting individual.
In 1827 and 1828, Mr. Stewart was occupied with the fourth volume of his Philosophy of the Human Mind, containing his Inquiries into the Active and Moral Powers or Man, and he was fortunately able to com plete it a few weeks before his death, and thus to bring to a close that great work, on which he had spent the flower of his youth, and the maturity of his more advanced years.
Mr. Stewart's health had been for some time de clining, but when he was on a visit to Edinburgh in the month of April 1828, he experienced a fresh pa ralytic attack which carried him off on the 11th of June, in the 75th year of his age. Ilis remains, which were accompanied to the grave by the magis trates of the city, and the professors of the university, were interred in the family burying-ground in the Canongate church-yard, already honoured as the burial place of Adam Smith. Mr. Stewart's personal friends and admirers have contributed a large sum. with which a monument will be speedily erected to his memory on some conspicuous spot in our northern metropolis.
Mr. Stewart left behind him a widow and two children, a son and daughter, whom he loved with the tenderest affection. To Mrs. Stewart and his only daughter he owed that sunshine of happiness, which, but with one cloud, Providence shed over his domestic life. They had been the ornaments of his social circle when his public station required him to mix largely with the world; and when they were called to higher duties by the infirmities of his age, they dis charged the obligations of conjugal and filial love with that self-devotion and sustained tenderness, which have their residence only in the female heart. His only son, Lieutenant-Colonel Matthew Stewart, al ready known by an able pamphlet on Indian affairs, and who, we believe, is now occupied in a larger work on the same subject, was fortunately in Scotland at the time of Mr. Stewart's death, and was able to pay the last duties of affection to his venerable parent.
Mr. Stewart was about the middle size, and was particularly distinguished by an expression of bene volence and intelligence, which Sir Henry Raeburn has well preserved in his portrait of him, painted for the late Lord \Voodhouselee before he had reached his 55th year.* Mr. Stewart had the remarkable pecu liarity of vision which made him insensible to the less refrangible colours of the spectrum.] This affection of the eye was long unknown both to himself and his friends, and was discovered from the accidental cir cumstance of one of his family directing his attention to the beauty of the fruit of the Siberian crab, when he found himself unable to distinguish the scarlet fruit from the green leaves of the tree.
Mr. Stewart's name honoured the lists of various learned academies. He was one of the members of the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh at its incor poration with the Royal Society in 1783. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of London, an honorary member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences at St. Petersburgh, a member of th,i Royal Academies of Berlin and Naples, of the American Philosophical Societies of Philadelphia and Boston, and honorary member of the Philosophical Society of Cambridge.
Besides the works which we have mentioned in the course of this notice, Mr. Stewart published his Outlines of Moral Philosophy, which appeared in 1793, and which he used as a textbook. This work has been recently translated into French; and it has been used as a text-book in several Colleges in America. He was also the author of two eloquent pamphlets on a local controversy now sunk into oblivion. He had laid down the resolution of never publishing any thing anonymously; and we believe he never deviated from so excellent a rule. See Dr. Brewster's Journal of Science, No. xx. p. 194, for a fuller account of the philosophy and private character of Mr. Stewart.