e old enough to remember a time,
contemporaneous with the latter days of Brown, when young students, in
their course of preparation for the learned professions, especially
for the Church, used to be ever recurring in conversation to the
staple metaphysical questions,--occasionally, no doubt, much in
the style of Jack Lizard in the _Guardian_, who comforted his
mother, when the worthy lady was so unlucky as to scald her hand
with the boiling tea-kettle, by assuring her there was no such thing
as heat, but which at least served to show that this branch of
liberal education fully occupied the mind of the individuals
ostensibly engaged in mastering it; and we remember a subsequent
time, when students--some of them very clever ones--seemed never to
have thought on these questions at all, and remained silent in
conversation when they chanced to be mooted by the men of an
earlier generation. During, however, the last ten years, mainly
through the revival of a taste for metaphysical inquiry in France
and Germany, which has reacted on this country, abstract questions on
the nature and functions of mind are again acquiring their modicum
of space and importance in Scotland. Our country no longer takes
the place it once did among the nations in this department, and never
again may; but it at least begins to remember it once was, and to
serve itself heir to the works of the older masters of mind; and
we regard it as an evidence of the reaction to which we refer, that a
greatly more complete edition of the writings of Dugald Stewart
than has yet appeared is at the present time in the course of
issuing from the press of one of our most respected Scotch
publishers--the inheritor of a name paramount in the annals of the
trade--Mr. Thomas Constable.

The writings of Dugald Stewart have been unfortunate in more than that
state of exhaustion and syncope into which metaphysical science
continued to sink during the lapse of more than half a generation
after the death of their author, and the commencement of which had
been remarked by Jeffrey more than half a generation before. From some
peculiar views--founded, we believe, on an overweening estimate of
their pecuniary value--the son and heir of the philosopher tabooed
their publication; and it is only now that, in consequence of his
death, and of the juster views entertained on the subject by a sister,
also recently deceased, that they are permitted to reappear. The
time, however, from tha