Stirling, JAMES HUTCHISON

Stirling, JAMES HUTCHISON, the most eminent of later Scottish philosophers, was born at Glasgow, June 22, 1820, took the course in both arts and medicine at Glasgow University, and practised a short time as a physician in South Wales. He next went to Germany, and gave himself devotedly for some years to the study of philosophy. The publication of his masterly and epoch-making work, The Secret of Hegel: being the Hegelian System in Origin, Principle, Form, and Matter (1865; 2d ed. 1898), opened up an unknown world to readers, and gave a powerful impulse to the study of philosophy generally. It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to find in the entire range of the literature of philosophy a higher masterpiece of exposition than this combination of erudition, analytic genius, and perspicuity. To this work, as full of individuality as learning, there followed in 1881 a complete Text-book to Kant, comprising a translation and reproduction of the Critique of Pure Reason, with a commentary and biographical sketch. These two works stand together in the most intimate relation, for, according to Stirling, from Kant's antecedent system Hegel's philosophy itself was but 'a development into full and final shape.' At the same time Dr Stirling brought Kantian speculation into line with English thought by demonstrating that the central problem of the critical philosophy was a question that had been already propounded, if not answered, by Hume. Stirling received the degree of LL.D. from Edinburgh in 1867, and was elected a foreign member of the Philosophical Society of Berlin in 1871. He delivered the first course of Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh, and these were published in 1890, the whole forming a vigorous if somewhat discursive work, in which natural theology is considered in its relation to the history of philosophy, and investigated mainly from the point of view of reason and the principles involved in the Theistic inference. Of the famous three proofs—the Teleological, the Cosmological, and the Ontological—he deals mainly with the first. 'Begin with which we may, and let them be separated from each other as they may be in time, the three, after all, do constitute together but the three undulations of a single wave, which wave is but a natural rise and ascent to God, on the part of man's own thought, with man's own experience and consciousness as the object before him.' Other works of Dr Stirling's are Sir William Hamilton: being the Philosophy of Perception (1865), an assault on Hamilton's doctrine of perception more serious still than Mill's; an excellent translation of Schwegler's History of Philosophy (1867; 11th ed. 1891); Jerrold, Tennyson, and Macaulay, &c. (1868); As Regards Protoplasm (1869; complete ed. 1872), a convincing answer to Huxley's Essay on the Physical Basis of Life; Lectures on the Philosophy of Law (1873), together with an incisive attack on Whewell and Robertson Smith for their statements anent Hegel's relations to Newton and the calculus; Burns in Drama (1878); Darwinianism: Workmen and Work (a criticism of the three Darwins, 1894); besides weighty lectures on such subjects as Materialism, Philosophy in the Poets, the Community of Property, Nationalisation of Land, &c. He contributed the article on Kant to the present work.