Life and Writings
Scottish philosopher, born at Glasgow March 8, 1788, died at Edinburgh
May 6, 1856. He studied first in Glasgow University, where his father
had been professor of anatomy and botany; took a course in medicine at
the University of Edinburgh in 1806-07; and in May, 1807, entered
Balliol College, Oxford (B.A., 1811; M.A., 1814), where he
concentrated upon classics and philosophy and gained the reputation of
being the most learned Aristotelian in the university. In 1813 he
settled in Edinburgh as an advocate, though he never secured a large
practice. In 1820 he established his claim to the baronetcy of
Preston, and was thenceforth known as Sir William. In the same year he
was defeated for the chair of moral philosophy at the University of
Edinburgh by John Wilson (Christopher North), but was elected to the
professorship of civil history in 1821. About 1826 he took up the
study of phrenology, and in 1826 and 1827 he read before the Royal
Society of Edinburgh several papers antagonistic to the alleged
science. He made his reputation as a philosopher by a series of
articles that began to appear in the Edinburgh Review in 1829. In 1836
he was elected to the chair of logic and metaphysics in the University
of Edinburgh, and held the position till his death. In 1843 he
contributed to the lively ecclesiastical controversy of the time by
publishing a pamphlet against the principle of non-intrusion. He was
answered by William Cunningham. In July, 1844, he suffered a stroke of
paralysis, which made him practically an invalid for the rest of his
life.
Hamilton's principal works are: Discussions on Philosophy and
Literature, Education and University Reform (London, 1852), containing
his articles published in the Edinburgh Review; Notes and
Dissertations, published with his edition of T. Reid's Works (2 vols.,
Edinburgh, 1846-63); and his Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic (ed. H.
L. Mansel and J. Veitch, 4 vols., 1859-60), of which an abridgment of
the metaphysical portion (vols. i. and ii.) was edited by F. Bowen
(Boston, 1870).
Philosophy Views
Hamilton was an exponent of the Scottish common-sense philosophy and a
conspicuous defender and expounder of Thomas Reid, though under the
influence of Kant he went beyond the traditions of the common-sense
school, combining with a naive realism a theory of the relativity of
knowledge. His psychology, while marking an advance on the work of
Reid and Stewart, was of the " faculty " variety and has now been
largely superseded by other views. His contribution to logic was the
now well-known theory of the quantification of the predicate, by which
he became the forerunner of the present algebraic school of logicians.
It is his law of the conditioned, with his correlative philosophy of
the unconditioned, which comes into nearest relation with theology.
This law is " that all that is conceivable in thought lies between two
extremes, which, as contradictory of each other, can not both be true,
but of which, as mutually contradictory, one must be true. . . . The
law of the mind, that the conceivable is in every relation bounded by
the inconceivable, I call the law of the conditioned." This involved
his position that the Infinite is "incognizable and inconceivable."
This doctrine on its philosophic side is a protest against Kant's
skeptical result affirming that reason lands in hopeless
contradictions; on its theological side it proclaims the impossibility
of knowing the Absolute Being. Only by taking first the philosophic
aspect can we correctly interpret its theological relations. Kant had
made a priori elements only forms of the mind; and accordingly, the
ideas of self, the universe, and God, became only regulative of our
intellectual procedure, and in no sense guaranties of truth.
Accordingly, Kant has dwelt on " the self-contradiction of seemingly
dogmatical cognitions (the cum antithesi) in none of which we can
discover any decided superiority." These were, that the world had a
beginning, that it had not; that every composite substance consists of
simple parts, that no composite thing does consist of simple parts;
that causality according to the laws of nature is not the only
causality operating to originate the world, that there is no other
causality; that there is an absolutely necessary being, that there is
not any such being. Hamilton's object was to maintain that such
contradictions are not the product of reason, but of an attempt to
press reason beyond its proper limits. If, then, we allow that the
conceivable is only of the relative and bounded, we recognize at once
that the so-called antinomies of reason are the result of attempts to
push reason beyond its own province, to make our conceptions the
measure of existence, attempting to bring the incomprehensible within
the limits of comprehension.
Thus far a real service was rendered by Hamilton in criticizing the
skeptical side of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. He estimated this
result so highly as to say of it, " if I have done anything
meritorious in philosophy, it is in the attempt to explain the
phenomena of these contradictions." At this point Hamilton ranks Reid
superior to Kant; the former ending in certainty, the latter in
uncertainty. But there remain for Hamilton's philosophy the questions:
If we escape contradiction by refusing to attempt to draw the
inconceivable within the limits of conception, what is the source of
certainty as to the infinite? How are knowledge and thought related to
the existence and attributes of the Infinite Being? Here Hamilton is
entangled in the perplexity of affirming certainty which is yet
unknowable. That there is an Absolute Being, source of all finite
existence, is, according to him, a certainty; but that we can have any
knowledge of the fact is by him denied. Reid had maintained the
existence of the Supreme Being as a necessary truth; and Hamilton
affirms that the divine existence is at least a natural inference; but
he nevertheless holds that the Deity can not be known by us. This is
with him an application of the law of the conditioned-a conclusion
inevitable under admission that all knowledge implies the relative,
the antithesis of subject and object. This doctrine of ignorance was
developed by H. L. Mansel, and eagerly embraced by the
experientialists, J. S. Mill and Herbert Spencer. This gave an impulse
to Agnosticism, the influence of which must be largely credited to
Kant, who reduced the a priori to a form of mental procedure, and to
Hamilton, who rejected Kant's view, yet regarded the absolute as
incognizable. However, while insisting that " the infinite God can not
by us, in the present limitation of our faculties, be comprehended or
conceived," Hamilton adds that "faith-belief is the organ by which we
apprehend what is beyond our knowledge."
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