speculations of the Peripatetics, the Schoolmen, and the modern Germans. No preceding British philosopher, with whose writings we are at all acquainted, makes any approach to the extent and minuteness of the kind of knowledge by which these pages are characterized. Indeed, with the exception of Bacon and Cudworth, in the seventeenth century, and Stewart and Sir James Mackintosh, in the nineteenth, our more distinguished metaphysicians and moralists have been conspicuously deficient in this important accomplishment. Locke, Butler, Hume, and Reid, made no pretension to a complete and exact acquaintance with the history of speculation.
Reading is valuable to the philosopher chiefly as one means for exciting his own power of thinking. Only a few minds, however, possess sufficient independent force to convert what they read into a source of intellectual nourishment; and even great intellects have been averse from an extensive acquaintance with books, from an apprehension of their tendency to fetter the independent working of the mental faculties. “If I had read as much as other men, I had been as ignorant as they,” is a well-known and memorable saying of Hobbes. But in these Dissertations the vigour of original speculation is preserved amid a boundless accumulation of materials collected out of what is contained in books. Leibnitz and Sir William Hamilton are to be noted among modern philosophers for the mental strength which can unite extraordinary reading with a ceaseless energy of thinking. But the mind of the German philosopher is perhaps
