The metaphysics of Sir William Hamilton : collected, arranged and abridged for the use of colleges and private students / by Francis Bowen.

  • Hamilton, William, Sir, 1788-1856.
Date:
1870
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The metaphysics of Sir William Hamilton : collected, arranged and abridged for the use of colleges and private students / by Francis Bowen. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    at the present day must be very imperfect which does not comprise a tolerably full view of Hamilton's Meta- physics, I have endeavored, in the present volume, to pre- pare a text-book which should contain, in his own language, the substance of all that he has written upon the subject. For this purpose, the Lectures on Metaphysics have been taken as the basis of the work; and I have freely abridged them by striking out the repetitions and redundancies in which they' abound, and omitting also, in great part, the load of citations and I'eferences that they contain, as these are of inferior interest except to a student of the history of philosophy, or as marks of the stupendous erudition of the author. The space acquired by these abridgments has enabled me to interweave into the book, in their appro- priate place and connection, all those portions of the Dis- cussions, and of the Notes and Dissertations supplemen- tary to Reid, which seemed necessary either to elucidate and confirm the text, or to supplement it with the later and more fully expressed opinions of the author. These insertions, always distinguished by angular brackets [ ], and referred to the source whence they were drawn, are very numerous and considerable in amount; sometimes they are several pages long, others do not exceed in length a single paragraph, or even a single sentence. The au- thor's language has invariably been preserved, and where- ever a word or tAvo had to be altered or supplied, to pre- serve the connection, the inserted words have been enclosed in brackets. The divisions between the Lectures, necessa- rily arbitrary, as the hmits of a discourse of fixed length could not coincide with the natural division of the subject, have not been preserved in this edition. A chapter here often begins in the middle of a Lecture, and sometimes comprises two or more Lectures. A very few notes, criti- cal or explanatory in character, are proj^erly distinguished as supj)lied by the American Editor. It has been a lab(jrious, but not a disagreeable task, to examine and collate three bulky octavos, with a view thus to condense their substance into a single volume of moder- ate dimensions. I cannot promise that the work has been thoroughly, but only that it has been carefully, done.