Born at Kilmabreck, Kirkcubrightshire, Scotland, Jan. 9, 1778: died at Brompton, near London, April 2, 1820. A noted Scottish physician, philosopher, and poet, colleague of Dugald Stewart from 1810. His works include “An Inquiry into the Relation of Cause and Effect” (1818), “Lectures on the Physiology of the Human Mind” (1820), “Poems” (1804), “Paradise of Coquettes” (1814), “The War-fiend” (1817), “Agnes” (1818), “Emily” (1819), etc. He is chiefly notable from his support of Hume’s theory of causation.

Personal

  I see Dr. Thomas Brown now and then, who is as witty, amusing, and metaphysical, and as good a son and brother, as ever.

  He seldom began to prepare any of his lectures till the evening of the day before it was delivered. He was often writing at his desk, when he heard the hour of twelve. When he hurried off to deliver what he had written. When his lecture was over, if the day was favourable, he generally took a walk, or employed his time in light reading, till his favorite beverage, tea, restored him again to a capacity for exertion.

  Even those who have never seen him can form a pretty lively image of him at this time, when his talents have reached all the maturity of which they are capable, and his reputation is at its height. In person, he is about the middle size; his features are regular, and in the expression of his countenance, and especially of his eye, there is a combination of sweetness and calm reflection. His manner and address are somewhat too fastidious, not to say finical and feminine, for a philosopher; but the youths who wait on his lectures are disposed to overlook this, when they fall under the influence of his gentleness, so fitted to win, and of the authority which he has to command. Expectation was on the tip-toe, and he fully met and gratified it. His amiable look, his fine elocution, his acuteness and ingenuity, his skill in reducing a complex subject into a few elements, his show of originality and independence, the seeming comprehensiveness of his system, and, above all, his fertility of illustration, and the glow, like that of stained glass, in which he set forth his refined speculations, did more than delight his youthful audience,—it entranced them; and, in their ecstasies, they declared that he was superior to all the philosophers who had gone before him, and, in particular, that he had completely superseded Reid, and they gave him great credit, in that he generously refrained from attacking and overwhelming Stewart. He had every quality fitted to make him a favourite with students. His eloquence would have been felt to be too elaborate by a younger audience, and regarded as too artificial and sentimental by an older audience, but exactly suited the tastes of youths between sixteen and twenty.

General

  We must acknowledge that, in the writings of Dr. Brown, there are too many obscure and difficult passages. After making due allowance for the imperfect state in which his manuscripts may have been left, for the abstruse and shadowy nature of many of his topics, and even for an occasional mysticism and unattainable aim in some of his thoughts, there still remain too many sentences to remind us, by contrast, of the unabating transparency of Mr. Stewart’s elocution. On the whole, we must allow, that our author’s is often a hard style to read, and, as we should have thought, a much harder one to hear. He seems frequently not to have adapted his sentences to the capacity of the ear. The attention is stormed and borne along, rather by the force and brilliancy of the expressions, by the earnest energy of the writer, and by the novelty, splendour, and importance, of his well selected topics, than by the clearness and distinctness of each successive position, and a certain smooth and resistless current of diction, of which Adam Smith, Paley, and Godwin in his philosophical works, occur to us just now as three of the most remarkable instances.

  His first tract on Causation appeared to me the finest model of discussion in Mental Philosophy since Berkeley and Hume: with this superiority over the latter, that its aim is that of a philosopher who seeks to enlarge knowledge, not that of a skeptic, the most illustrious of whom have no better end than that of displaying their powers in confounding and darkening every truth; so that their very happiest efforts cannot be more leniently described than as brilliant fits of debauchery.

  Thomas Brown was an intimate friend of mine, and used to dine with me regularly every Sunday in Edinburgh. He was a Lake poet, a profound metaphysician, and one of the most virtuous men that lived. As a metaphysician, Dugald Stewart was a humbug to him. Brown had real talents for the thing. You must recognize in reading Brown, many of those arguments with which I have so often reduced you to silence in metaphysical discussions. Your discovery of Brown is amusing. Go on! You will detect Dryden if you persevere; bring to light John Milton, and drag William Shakspeare from his ill-deserved obscurity!

  Neither his poetry nor his lectures, however, are destined to any permanent fame; and the latter, as might have been anticipated from his hasty preparations, have already lost the place they for a short time obtained among the text-books of our colleges and universities.

  As a writer, Brown must be regarded as eminently successful. Inferior to Stewart in classic chasteness of diction, and philosophic elegance of style, yet his mind was of that poetic order which can throw a luxuriance, perhaps we might say a redundancy of imagery and illustration, around every subject that it undertakes. From this, mainly, has arisen the great popularity of his lectures, which have not only passed through many editions, but are now, after more than twenty years, in almost as great request as they were at first…. That Brown possessed splendid abilities, and that his writings generally are marked with superior excellence, every candid reader must admit. The most distinctive feature of his mind is generally allowed to have been the power of analysis, which he greatly transcended all philosophers of the Scottish school who preceded him.

  Brown, in his great work, [“Cause and Effect”]—one of the greatest which this century has produced.

  The psychology of Brown may be summarily described as a combination of the Scottish philosophy of Reid and Stewart, and of the analyses by Condillac, Destutt de Tracy, and the higher philosophers of the sensational school of France, together with views of the association of ideas derived from a prevailing British school. To Reid and Stewart he was indebted more than he was willing to allow, and it would have been better for his ultimate reputation had he imbibed more of their spirit, and adhered more closely to their principles. He admits everywhere with them the existence of principles of irresistible belief; for example, he comes to such a principle when he is discussing the beliefs in our personal identity, and in the invariability of the relation between cause and effect. But acknowledging, as he does, the existence of intuitive principles, he makes no inquiry into their nature and laws and force, or the relation in which they stand to the faculties. In this respect so far from being an advance on Reid and Stewart, he is rather a retrogression. His method is as much that of Condillac, Destutt de Tracy, and the ideologists of France, as that of Reid and Stewart.

  The fame achieved by the Lectures when published surpassed even what they had attained when delivered. It is no exaggeration to say that never before or since has a work of metaphysics been so popular. In 1851 the book had reached its 19th edition in England, and in America its success was perhaps greater. Since that time, however, its popularity has declined with almost equal rapidity, judgments on its merits are now as severe as they were formerly favorable, and the name of Brown may be said to be a dead letter in the annals of philosophy…. On the whole, it will be seen from this brief statement of what was new in Brown’s philosophy that it occupies an intermediate place between the earlier Scottish school and the later analytical or associational psychology. To the latter Brown really belonged, but he had preserved certain doctrines of the older school which were out of harmony with his fundamental view. He still retained a small quantum of intuitive beliefs, and did not appear to see that the very existence of these could not be explained by his theory of mental action. This intermediate or wavering position accounts for the comparative neglect into which his works have now fallen. They did much to excite thinking, and advanced many problems by more than one step, but they did not furnish a coherent system, and the doctrines which were then new have since been worked out with greater consistency and clearness.

  That he should have accomplished the amount of literary work that he did during his short life is amazing. Little of it can be said now to live, with the exception, perhaps, of his “Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind,” which are not only to be valued as an elucidation of mental science, but also as an interesting monument of the brilliant genius and indefatigable industry of a most amiable and deserving man. The fault of the work is its prolixity, and that the same ground is traced over and over again, in lecture after lecture, with tedious iteration. However, the defect, so to call it, has certainly this counterbalancing advantage, that it impresses what the writer has to teach on the mind of the reader with such singular clearness, that it is well-nigh impossible to mistake his sense. It should, too, in fairness be remembered that the lectures were prepared merely for oral delivery. They were never corrected by the author for the press; but were printed off from his manuscripts after his death, with all their blemishes and mistakes, and published precisely as he wrote them.

  In spite of his original and suggestive work in detail, Brown thus failed to create a perfectly coherent system of thought. This defect impaired, and within a generation totally destroyed, his influence upon the course of speculation.