Volume 1

William Whewell, D.D., Master of Trinity College, Cambridge : an account of his writings with selections from his literary and scientific correspondence / by I. Todhunter.

  • Isaac Todhunter
Date:
1876
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: William Whewell, D.D., Master of Trinity College, Cambridge : an account of his writings with selections from his literary and scientific correspondence / by I. Todhunter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    381/456 (page 345)
    CHAPTER XVIII. NOTES ON BOOKS. [I HAVE already alluded to three sets of manuscripts preserved among the papers of Dr Whewell, namely the collections made for the Bridgewater Treatise and for the History and Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, the lectures and discussions on Moral Science, and the Sermons. Besides these there are others which may be arranged in three sets, namely, Notes on Books read including some very early essays on various subjects, Poetical pieces, Miscellaneous Prose pieces. I shall publish extracts from these three sets, taking in the present Chapter the first set. This collection has been thus described by Mr W. G. Clark: This consists of a vast body of notes on the books which he lead fiom the year 1817 to 1830—books in almost all the languages m Europe, histories of all countries, ancient and modern, treatises on all sciences, moral and physical. Among the rest is an epitome of Kant’s ' Kritik der reinen Yernunft,’ a work which exercised a marked influence on all his speculations in mental philosophy. I place the extracts in chronological order, beginning with some which are undated, but almost certainly belonging to the years 1810 and 1817. In this and the following two Chapters my own remarks will be enclosed in square brackets, and all the rest belongs to Dr Whewell] [Personal Identity]. Nothing is more absurd than to talk of a person’s identity, according to any imaginable criterion of identity, but most of all the criterion of consciousness. Every person must be conscious that he knows no persons so different from each other as lie knows himself to be from himself in another situation. Alone and in company—making himself master of the