Review of the Work of Mr John Stuart Mill Entitled, 'Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy.‪'‬

Sir W. Hamilton has exercised powerful influence over the stream of thought during the present generation. The lectures on Logic and Metaphysics delivered by him at Edinburgh, for twenty years, determined the view taken of those subjects by a large number of aspiring young students, and determined that view for many of them permanently and irrevocably. [1] Several eminent teachers and writers of the present day are proud of considering themselves his disciples, enunciate his doctrines in greater or less proportion, and seldom contradict him without letting it be seen that they depart unwillingly from such a leader. Various new phrases and psychological illustrations have obtained footing in treatises of philosophy, chiefly from his authority. We do not number ourselves among his followers; but we think his influence on philosophy was in many ways beneficial. He kept up the idea of philosophy as a subject to be studied from its own points of view: a dignity which in earlier times it enjoyed, perhaps, to mischievous excess, but from which in recent times it has far too much receded especially in England. He performed the great service of labouring strenuously to piece together the past traditions of philosophy, to re discover those which had been allowed to drop into oblivion, and to make out the genealogy of opinions as far as negligent predecessors had still left the possibility of doing so.