M'Cosh, JAMES

M'Cosh, JAMES, one of the most voluminous defenders of the Scottish philosophy in recent times, was born at Carskeoch, Ayrshire, 1st April 1811. After studying at Glasgow and Edinburgh, he became a minister of the Church of Scotland, and was settled at Arbroath in 1835. In 1839 he removed to Brechin, and four years later cast in his lot with the Free Church. In 1851 he was appointed professor of Logic and Metaphysics in Queen's College, Belfast, a position which he held till 1868, when he was called to the Presidency of the college of New Jersey, Princeton, U.S.A. After a very successful tenure, Dr M'Cosh resigned this office in 1888 in order to devote the close of his life more exclusively to philosophical production. Dr M'Cosh's first important work was The Method of the Divine Government, Physical and Moral (1850; 9th ed. 1867). It was followed in 1860 by The Intuitions of the Mind inductively investigated. When Mill published his Examination of Sir W. Hamilton's Philosophy in 1865, Dr M'Cosh was one of the numerous critics who broke a lance for Scottish philosophy and examined the examiner. His Examination of Mr J. S. Mill's Philosophy (1866) is entitled 'a defence of fundamental truth.' Dr M'Cosh, who died 16th November 1894, defended what he considers the Natural Realism of Reid against both the empirical school and the relativistic views of Kant, Hamilton, and Mansel; and maintained the older intuitional view against the associationists and evolutionists on the one hand and the transcendentalists on the other. In 1875 he published a useful history of The Scottish Philosophy. He has also published a series of philosophical tracts for the times, collected as Realistic Philosophy (2 vols. 1887), Psychology (1886), and First and Fundamental Truths (1889). The Religious Aspect of Evolution appeared in 1890.