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and the fine arts are almost always ingenious and valuable ; and his chapter on association contains some of the happiest and most successful applications of this principle to illustrate these interesting departments of mental philosophy that are any where to be met with . When to this it is added , that his
views on all the more practical questions of morals were just and enlightened , and that in political and economical science he espoused the most liberal and enlarged principles and powerfully recommended them by his eloquence , we shall be prepared to admit that his claims on the public gratitude for important services rendered to the cause of philosophy and the best interests of man are by no means inconsiderable .
The present work is an expansion of the more general view given of its subject in the author ' s Outlines of Moral Philosophy , and in fact , contains the substance of the lectures which he was accustomed to deliver in the University of Edinburgh , and of which that publication constituted the groundwork . This circumstance may , perhaps , in some degree , account for the frequent repetitions , the diffuseness , and the somewhat annoying egotism , which indeed characterize most of Mr . Stewart ' s writings , but are particularly remarkable in this . It is divided into four books , in the first of which the
author treats of what he calls instinctive principles of action ; including , under this designation , the appetites , desires , and affections ; the second is entitled , of our rational and governing principles , and is devoted to the consideration of the principle of self-love and the moral sense or faculty ; the third and fourth books relate to the various branches of human duty which are considered according to the commonly received division of duties to God , to our fellow-creatures , and to ourselves . At the end of the fourth
book is introduced , not in conformity with any very strict or methodical principle of arrangement , a chapter on the different theories which have been formed concerning the object of moral approbation . In the first book , as will be expected by those who know any thing of the distinguishing tenets of the metaphysical school of which Mr . Stewart was so bright an ornament , he enters pretty largely into the argument in favour of the doctrine which refers the greater part of our active principles to instincts
originally implanted in the human mind , in opposition to the opinion of those who see in these states of mind nothing but the results of education and experience operating , it is true , upon the original frame of the mind , but in a mode reducible to certain general laws . To this question , which has often been the subject of keen and eager debate , it may perhaps be found that an undue degree of importance has been attached , and that no practical conclusions of much value are materially affected by our adopting
either side of the argument . We suspect it will even be found in some cases that the difference between the parties is more apparent than real . It is admitted by the opponents of instinctive principles , that there exists an origiual ^^ astkulion of human irattrre upon which external circumstances are to operate in producing the development of the mental and moral powers ; and , ( though their language is not always consistent or reconcileable to this supposition , ) it is not in general contended by the patrons of this doctrine
that original instincts would produce the effects we observe independently of education . " The question respecting innate ideas , " says Lord Shaftsbury , in a passage quoted and approved by Mr . Stewart , " is not about the time the ideas entered , but whether the constitution of man be such , that being adult and grown up , at such or such a time , sooner or later , ( no matter when , ) the idea and sense of order , administration , ancj a God , will not infallibly , inevitably , necessarily , spring up in him ?"
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32 Dugald Stewart .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1829, page 32, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2568/page/32/
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