THE

PHILOSOPHY

OF THE

ACTIVE AND MORAL POWERS

OF MAN.

BY

DUGALD STEWART, Esq. F.R.SS. LOND. & Ed.

HONORARY MEMBER OF THE IMPERIAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
AT ST. PETERSBURG; MEMBER OF THE ROYAL ACADEMIES OF
BERLIN AND OF NAPLES; OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETIES OF
PHILADELPHIA AND OF BOSTON; AND HONORARY MEMBER OF
THE PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OF CAMBRIDGE; FORMERLY
PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF
EDINBURGH.

VOLUME FIRST.

LIBRARY
PRINCETON NJ

BOSTON:

WELLS AND LILLY, COURT-STREET.

1828.

10/20

PREFACE.

BEFORE proceeding to my proper subject, I may be permitted to say something in explanation of the large, and perhaps disproportionate space which I have allotted in these volumes to the Doctrines of Natural Religion. To account for this I have to observe, that this part of my Work contains the substance of Lectures given in the University of Edinburgh in the year 1792-3, and for almost twenty years afterwards, and that my hearers comprised many individuals, not only from England and the United States of America, but not a few from France, Switzerland, the north of Germany, and other parts of Europe. To those who reflect on the state of the world at that period, and who consider the miscellaneous circumstances and characters of my audience, any further explanation on this head is, I trust, unnecessary.

The danger with which I conceived the youth of this country to be threatened by that inundation of sceptical or rather atheistical publications which were then imported from the Continent, was immensely increased by the enthusiasm which, at the dawn of the French Revolution, was naturally excited in young and generous minds. A supposed connexion between an enlightened zeal for Political Liberty and the reckless boldness of the uncompromising freethinker, operated powerfully with the vain and the ignorant in favour of the publications alluded to.

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