I felt that I had a soul.His noble views, unfolded in glorious sentences, elevated me into a higher world."There were hearers who felt that there was a want in his expositions, and there are readers still who feel in the same way.Ardent youths, like Brown and Chalmers, looked on him as timid and over-cautious.Chalmers wrote in 1801: " Iattend his lectures regularly.I must confess I have been rather disappointed.I never heard a single discussion of Stewart's which made up one masterly and comprehensive whole.His lectures seem to me to be made up of detached hints and incomplete outlines, and he almost uniformly avoids every subject which involves any difficult discussion." Chalmers lived to proclaim him the highest of academic moralists.Still there was ground, in appearance and in reality, for the early criticism.In his writings he adopts the plan which Dr.Robertson took credit for introducing, that of throwing a great deal of his matter into notes and illustrations.This method, carried to the extent to which it has been done by Robertson, Stewart, and M'Crie, is a radically defective one, as it interrupts the flow of {282} the discourse, and, with this, the interest in and comprehension of the whole.He has a most sensitive aversion to all such bold speculations as Leibnitz indulged in, and is jealous of all such consecutive deductions as Descartes and Kant have drawn out.He has no ability for sharp analysis, and he looks on a high abstraction with as great terror as some men do on ghosts.He studiously avoids close discussion, and flinches from controversy; he seems afraid of fighting with an opponent, lest it should exhibit him in no seemly attitudes.Seldom does he venture on a bold assertion, and, when he does, he takes shelter immediately after behind an authority.Determined to sustain his dignity and keep up his flow of language, he often takes rounded sentences and paragraphs to bring out what a more direct mind would have expressed in a single clinching clause, or even by an expressive epithet.Often does the eager, ingenuous youth, in reading his pages, wish that he would but lay aside ceremony for a very little, and speak out frankly and heartily.
Still we should form a very unjust opinion of Stewart, if, in consequence of weaknesses, we thought him devoid of originality, independence, or profundity.We certainly do not claim for him the sagacity of Locke, or the speculative genius of Leibnitz, or a power of generalizing, details equal to Adam Smith, or the shrewdness of Reid, or the logical grasp of Kant and Hamilton, and I admit that he was inferior to all these men in originality; but he has admirable qualities of his own, in soundness of judgment he is more to be trusted than any of them; and, if he is without some of their excellencies, he is also without some of their faults.He has no such rash and unmeasured diatribes as Locke's assault on innate ideas; no such extravagances as the monadical theory of Leibnitz; no such wasting of ingenuity as Smith's theory in his " Moral Sentiments; " he does not commit such gross misapprehensions in scholarship as Reid does; and he never allows any logic to conduct him to such preposterous conclusions as Kant and Hamilton landed themselves in, when they declared causation to be a law of thought and not of things.I have noticed that in many cases Stewart hides his originality as carefully as others boast of theirs.Often have I found, after going the round of philosophers in seeking light on some abstruse subject, that, on {283} turning to Stewart, his doctrine is, after all, the most profound, as it s the most judicious.
I do not mean to enter into the details of his remaining life.In 1783, he married a Miss Bannatyne of Glasgow, who died in 1787, leaving an only child, afterwards Colonel Stewart.He spent the summers of 1788 and 1789 on the Continent.In the appendix to the Memoir, there is a selection from the letters which he wrote to his friends at home.Though written in the midst of instructive scenes, and on the eve of great events, they are excessively general and common-place, and display no shrewdness of observation.In 1790, he married a daughter of Lord Cranston, a lady of high accomplishments, fascinating manners, and literary tastes.
His house now became the resort of the best society of Edinburgh, and he himself the centre and bond of an accomplished circle, at a time when the metropolis of Scotland in the winter months was the residence of many of the principal Scottish families, and of persons of high literary and scientific eminence.The weekly reunions in his house, which happily blended the aristocracies of rank and letters, bringing together the peer and the unfriended scholar, were for many years the source of an influence that most beneficially affected the society of the capital.His influence was extended by his receiving into his house, as boarders, young men chiefly of rank and fortune.In his classes of moral philosophy and of political economy, he had under him a greater body of young men who afterwards distinguished themselves, than any other teacher that I can think of.Among them we have to place Lord Brougham, Lord Palmerston, Lord John Russell, Francis Horner, Lord Lansdowne, Francis Jeffrey, Walter Scott, Sydney Smith, Thomas Brown, Thomas Chalmers, James Mill, Archibald Alison, and many others who have risen to great eminence in politics, in literature, or philosophy; and most of these have acknowledged the good which they derived from his lectures, while some of them have carried out in practical measures the principles which he inculcated.He seems, in particular, to have kindled a fine enthusiasm in the breast of Francis Horner, who ever speaks of him in terms of loftiest admiration, and, though cut off in early life, lived long enough to exhibit the high moral aims which he had imbibed from the lessons of Stewart.{284}
