Some nineteenth century Scotsmen : being personal recollections / by William Knight.

  • William Angus Knight
Date:
1903 [1902]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Some nineteenth century Scotsmen : being personal recollections / by William Knight. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON 1788-1856 These can be no doubt that Sir William Hamilton was the strongest and finest intellectual force in the University of Edinburgh during his twenty years’ tenure of the office of Professor of Logic and Meta¬ physics in it. Others excelled him in many ways—in brilliancy, in scientific discovery, and above all in elan, the magnetic contagious force of genius—but no one surpassed him in learning, not only within his chosen line of research but beyond it in many an unfamiliar path. No one was more lucid as an expounder of first principles ; and, as a consequence, no one—in his time—laid hold of the intellect and the imagination of students in the same way. Professor Ferrier s tribute to him will be found in a subsequent page,1 and his life-work has been chronicled by his most de¬ voted pupil, Professor Veitch, both in his “Memoir”2 and in a subsequent monograph upon him, in my “ Philosophical Classics for English Readers.”3 [I cannot repeat anything already said in these books. My present work is supplementary to them.] 1 See p. 2 Memoir of Sir William Hamilton, Bart., by John Veitch, 1869. 3 See Hamilton, by John Veitch, 1882.
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