This method of address, and the whole circumstances of his position, were favourable to the display of Stewart's peculiar powers of developing speculative doctrines with those accessories of appropriate illustration and analogy, and the resources of a graceful, copious, and flexible diction, of which he was so great a master. His powers were now beginning to expand in their first freshness and ardour, and were submitted to less restraint than was imposed by an increasingly fastidious taste on their later exercise. It is not, therefore, matter of surprise if, even in his later days of more matured thinking, and amid the splendid triumphs of a more chastened oratory, some who were privileged to listen to him at both periods, were disposed to accord to the earlier effort the palm of greater vivacity, force, and impressiveness. The theory of Stewart's success as a lecturer in morals, as well in this his first and almost extemporaneous effort, as at a later period of his career, is given, even to the minutest details, by Cicero, when he says:-"Rerum copia verborum copiam gignit; et, si est honestas in rebus ipsis de quibus dicitur, existit ex rei natura quidam splendor in verbis. Sit modo is, qui dicet aut scribet, institutus liberaliter educatione doctrinaque puerili, et flagret studio, et a natura adjuvetur, et in universorum generum infinitis disceptationibus exercitatus, ornatissimos scriptores oratoresque ad cognoscendum imitandumque delegerit; nae ille haud sane, quemadmodum verba struat et illuminet, a magistris istis requiret: ita facile in rerum. abundantia ad orationis ornamenta sine duce, natura ipsa, si modo est exercitata, labetur."1 In 1783, Mr. Stewart visited Paris for the first time, in com of the mansion, or in the avenue, under the shade of its stately trees, meditating what he was about to write. He then retired to his study, and committed to writing, without break, what he had thus previously arranged in his mind. He spoke as well as composed with great ease, accuracy, and finish. From the following passage in a letter to his friend, M. Prévost, (1798,) it would, however, appear, that he was pany with his friend Lord Ancram, afterwards sixth Marquis of Lothian. Of the particulars of this visit no record has been preserved. 1 On his return to Scotland, in the autumn of the same year, he married Helen, daughter of Neil Bannatyne, Esq., Glasgow, the object of an early and prolonged attachment. Mrs. Stewart died in 1787, leaving an only child, afterwards LieutenantColonel Matthew Stewart, on whom his father's affection centred with a peculiar intensity. The Memoir which Colonel Stewart has left is a discriminative and affectionate tribute to a father whom he revered, and whose memory, even during the clouded years of the latter portion of his life, he cherished with a feeling akin to idolatry. 1 Matthew Stewart entered the army in 1804, as lieutenant in the Royal Engineers. He went to India as aidede-camp to the Earl of Minto, where he was allowed to exchange from the Engineers into the Line. He obtained a company in the 22d Foot. He was subsequently aide-de-camp to Lord Moira, who became Governor-General of India in 1812. He received his LieutenantColonelcy in 1816, and served for some time with his regiment, the York Rangers, in the West Indies. In 1819 he became Lieutenent-Colonel of the 10th Foot; and after continuing with his regiment for a few years, retired on halfpay. He obtained the rank of Colonel in 1837; and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and member of the Asiatic Society of Calcutta. Colonel Stewart died in 1851. He was the author of several able pamphlets. Among these are the following: 1. Considerations on the Policy of the Government of India. 1826. 2. On the State and Policy of the Nation. 1828. 3. A Letter to the Earl of Lauderdale on the subject of his Three Letters to the Duke of Wellington. 1829. 4. Remarks on the Present State of Affairs. 1830. 5. Examination of the Ministerial Plan of Reform. 1831. CHAPTER II. Mr. Stewart appointed to the Chair of Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh-The comprehension of his course of teaching-Its grounds- Stewart as a lecturer-His personal appearance and manner in the Chair-His general aim as a philosophical thinker and teacher-His view of the nature and conditions of human perfection-Its importance-His characteristics as a thinker, and special qualifications as a teacher of philosophy-The nature and extent of his influence-His Lectures on Politics proper and Political Economy-Comprehension of Political Economy-His aim and influence as a political speculator-Students of Political Economy. MR. STEWART continued in the Chair of Mathematics for some years longer. On the resignation of Adam Ferguson in 1785, he was transferred to the Chair of Moral Philosophy. This was his appropriate sphere, and the scene of a most brilliant and successful course of academical teaching-an art of which there have been but few masters. From his appointment to the Chair of Moral Philosophy in 1785, until his retirement from active academical duty in 1810 -that is, for a quarter of a century-Mr. Stewart exercised, by his teaching alone, without taking into account the concurrent and more general impression made by his published writings, a wide, powerful, and peculiarly elevating and refining influence. His popularity as a lecturer increased to the last. Among his students were to be found, not only the youth of Scotland, but many, and these of the highest rank, from 1 He appears to have found the routine of mathematical teaching but little congenial. In a letter to his friend Mr. Alison, without date, but probably written in 1782, he says, "I am some what in low spirits at the prospect of winter, particularly at the thought of teaching Euclid for the thirteenth time." England. The continent of Europe, and America, likewise furnished a large proportion of pupils.1 The sphere of investigation which Mr. Stewart proposed to himself in the Chair of Morals, was far from being limited by the science of Ethics proper. His fundamental principle of the organic unity of the sciences he designated philosophical, as opposed to physical, precluded the isolated prosecution of any individual science, or part of the whole. In his view those sciences are branches whose life and nourishment spring from a single root; and, like the tree of the forest, or the flower of the field, only attain the fulness of healthy development, and perfect symmetry, by growth that is simultaneous and harmonious. In speculation, as in true practical development, we must, according to Stewart, seek simultaneously to evolve a totality, just as nature in her perfect works, "rudimenta partium omnium simul parit et producit." While scrupulously faithful to the observational and inductive method of Reid, and agreeing with that thinker in regarding the facts or phænomena of mind as the object of a real and independent science, Stewart marks with even greater emphasis than his master, the need of the application of that method to the phænomena in their totality. The first, proper, and adequate object of philosophical inquiry is, as he repeatedly tells us, "human nature considered as one great whole," i.e., in the sum of its phænomena. This is the foundation of what, according to Stewart, is the ultimate aim of speculation, viz., the determination of the various special ends and methods of the sciences, philosophical and physical, and the analysis, as far as is legitimate, of the ground of our certainty regarding real existence as well as purely formal truth; or, to use his own language, the constitution of a Rational Logic. The conjoint 1 Mr. Stewart gave his first course of lectures as Professor of Moral Philosophy, in 1785-86-number of students, 102; his last session was 1808-9-number of students, 150. During the twenty-four years he occupied the Chair, the average attendance of students on the Winter Course of Moral Philosophy alone, was 138; the lowest number being 87, and the highest 196, (1807-8.) Mr. Stewart gave Summer Courses of Lectures on Moral Philosophy, beginning in the year 1791, and terminating in 1796; the average attendance on the Summer Course was 26. development of the philosophical sciences, besides being necessitated by the fact that certain of those sciences stand to others in a relation of subordination, and that all spring from Psychology as the root, affords one principal safeguard against error in the individual sciences themselves-for an erroneous or imperfect solution of a question in one department is made manifest, and a ground of correction afforded, by the result being found to run counter to what is independently ascertained in another. Moral data, for example, often reveal the erroneous character of conclusions in regard to Being, and, it may be, prevent us from overstepping in our Metaphysics the bounds of legitimate speculation. This general study of human nature affords, besides, the exclusive condition and the means of true liberal culture. General Psychology is thus the centre whence the thinker goes outward to the circumference of human knowledge. Stewart did not, however, cherish the vain dream of attaining the principles of universal science, as thus defined, by individual effort, far less of reaching more than a relative and partial knowledge of existence. To contribute, as far as is possible by the labours of a single life, to the constitution of this general science, at the same time to cherish by reflective studies, a noble life in man, humble, reverent, and hopeful, and raise liberal self-culture on the basis of true self-knowledge —such is in sum Stewart's philosophical aim; an ideal first conceived in the ardour of early youth, and worthy of the fine powers which, during a long life, he religiously consecrated to its realisation.1 1 Mr. Stewart has nowhere developed his view of the precise relation of Psychology to the sciences he denominates philosophical, nor has he fully specified the modes and degrees of dependence subsisting among those sciences. He expressly refrains, indeed, from attempting their scientific organization. He has, however, explicitly recognised the contrast of the phænomena of mind and matter, and the diverse faculties called into exercise in the study of them, as well as the kinds of science to which the investigation of the opposed phænomena gives rise. M. Jouffroy has criticised the views of Reid and Stewart on this point, and essayed to supplement them, without, however, really adding anything to what they have expressly recognised in theory, as well as proceeded on in practice. See Euvres de Reid, |