HAMILTON, SIR WILLIAM, as bead of the old family of the Ilamiltons of Preston, in Haddingtonshire, inherited a baronetcy created in 1673, but for a time dormant. He was born on the 8th of March 1783, in Glasgow, where his father, Dr. Hamilton, was a pro fessor in the university ; end there he received the earlier part of his academical education. The Snell foundation of exhibitions in Balliol College has long been a prize for the more distinguished among the Glasgow atudenta : Adam Smith among others owed his English education to it. As a Snell exhibitioner Hamilton went to Oxford ; and he took his degree with honours as a first-class man, proceeding afterwards to A.M.
In 1813 he was admitted a member of the Scottish bar. But law, except the Roman, did not receive much of his attention ; and the only practice he ever had was the very little which became incumbent on him, when, after a time, he was appointed crown solicitor of teinds or tithes. Even while a very young man, he had acquired no small part of his singular and varied stock of knowledge ; and mental philosophy began early to be his favourite pursuit. On the death of Thomas Brown, in 1820, he stood for tho professorship of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh : but Mr. Wilson was the successful candidate. Next year, on the nomination of the bar, he became Professor of Universal History in the same university. Thls appointment, little more than nominal in respect of emoluments, was hardly better as to the performance of duty. The department is not in any way Imperative on students; and it never commanded pupils unless for a while under the elder Tytler. Sir William, being, though not rich, yet independent of professional drudgery, was left, undis turbed and undiverted, to the prosecution of his studies and specula tions. It was long before these bore fruits visible to any but his im mediate friends. For the digesting of his thoughts he was nearly as independent of the necessity of writing, as his iron memory made him to bo for the preservation of his knowledge ; and he seems to have long shrunk from the toil of endeavouring to expound ideas, for which be did not hope to find an apt or sympathising audience. It was only, as he himself has declared, on the pressing request of the editor of the ' Edinburgh Review,' that he was induced, in 1829, to give to that periodical the first of a series of contributions, which closed in 1839, and which unfortunately constitutes as yet by much the larger propor tion of his published writings. Those papers exhibit tho variety of
his learning not leas than its depth ; and the philosophical essays which were among them speedily found readers, who, if few, were competent to do them justice.] In 1836 he found his right place : he was appointed by the town council of Edinburgh, though not without a contest, to he Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in the University. He was, what very few of the Scottish professors holding offices thus designated have been, at home in both of the spheres indicated by the official title. The vague term which stands second, opened up to him in his teaching any walk he might choose to tread in the vast field of mental philosophy, of which he had probably in his studies traversed more than any other man then or now alive. The first title pointed his way to one special mental science, which he bad studied in all its existing shapes, and which he now set about systematising in harmony with new lights that had dawned on his own mind. Instead of following the usual professorial practice, of combining the whole matter of his instructions into one course of lectures, to be delivered in one and the same session (a term of six months in each year), he lectured alternately in the one named section and in the other—in Logic one year, in Metaphysics the next ; and he had the gratification of defeating, after a whimsical squabble, an attempt of the town council, who are the legal administrators of that university, to force him into the common practice. His reputation and his influence now extended rapidly. Long before 1836, he had become celebrated in the learned circles of Germany, and had begun to be known and estimated by many at home : the most eminent foreign thinkers had concurred with not a few of our own, in pressing earnestly the pre-eminence of his claim to the Logic chair ; and in England, as well as in Scotland, philosophical speculators discovered more and more plainly that, in those fragmentary treatises of his, there had been opened veins of thought which thinking men durst not leave untested.