STEWART, Dugald, the illustrious son of the eminent mathematician whose merits are recorded in the preceding article, was born at Edinburgh on the 22d of November 1753. As a pupil in the High School of his native city, he was remarkable for the command of language exhibited in his exercises; and at college his turn for mental science began unequivocally to develop itself. In his nineteenth year he attended at Glasgow a course of lectures delivered by Dr Reid, of whose doctrines he was destined to be the most distinguished amender and expounder. In the course of that winter he composed, and read in a literary association, an essay on Dreaming, which afterwards took its place as an interesting section in his principal work.
But his youthful talents and acquirements were speedily subjected to a much more decisive test. Soon after the period of his studies in Glasgow, he assumed, on the decline of his father's health, the sole charge of his classes in the university of Edinburgh, and on the completion of his twenty-first year was appointed to the mathematical professorship, as assistant and successor. His popularity as a teacher in this department was remarkable; but when he was just twenty-five years old, an opportunity was fortunately afforded him of proving his qualifications for communicating knowledge in his favourite branch of philosophy. Dr Ferguson, the professor of moral philosophy, having gone to America on a public mission, Mr Stewart undertook to fill his place during the session of 1778-9: he entered on the duties of the situation within a week after having promised to discharge them; and for six months, besides teaching his two mathematical classes and a new class of astronomy, he delivered a course of lectures on ethics, thinking over every morning the subject of lecture for the day, and addressed his pupils without having written the discourse or made any further preparation. Those who then heard him considered
his extemporaneous lectures as possessing an energy and liveliness even exceeding that which distinguished his later addresses. He was soon transferred permanently to the post which he thus had temporarily filled; Dr Ferguson retiring in 1785, and Mr Stewart, then thirty-two years old, being appointed to the chair of moral philosophy in his room. While his fame as a lecturer rapidly spread all over Great Britain, he long abstained from communicating his speculations to the world in any more durable form. His earliest published work, the first volume of his Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, did not appear till 1792. In 1793 he published his Outlines of Moral Philosophy, an unpretending text-book, but which exhibits his powers of generalization in the most favourable point of view. During several subsequent years his only publications were, the life of Dr Smith in 1793, that of Dr Robertson in 1796, and that of Dr Reid in 1802. These lives appeared in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. But, in the mean time, among his pupils he numbered many of those young men whose talents have since illustrated the northern division of the island; and, without naming those who have shone in political or professional life, it is enough to say that his Elements and his Lectures were the spark that first kindled the metaphysical genius of his own successor. As early likewise as 1780, before his first marriage, he had begun to receive into his family a few private pupils of rank; and some years after his second marriage in 1790, he again opened his house for the same purpose, and superintended the education of several who have occupied a prominent place as British statesmen. His ready command over his own mind was shown, not only by the ease with which he discharged the duties involved in these various avocations, but by his adding to his former course of instruction, in 1800, a series of lectures on Political Economy, which however were not continued. Nor is it unimportant to add, that on several occasions when his colleagues were incapacitated from acting, he temporarily gave lectures on natural philosophy, logic, and rhetoric.
In the winter of 1808-9, Mr Stewart, still in the zenith of his fame, but suffering under ill health, and dejected by the recent loss of his younger son, found himself obliged for a time to discharge the duties of his chair by deputy. In the following session his indisposition was more prolonged; and, strongly attached to private study, and sensitively alive to his reputation as a public teacher, he resolved to retire altogether from active life. In May 1810, Dr Thomas Brown, his late assistant, was in consequence conjoined with him as the acting professor.
After his retirement he lived constantly, as he had formerly done occasionally, at Kinneill House, situated on the Firth of Forth, about twenty miles west from Edinburgh. In this retreat he finished his volume of Philosophical Essays, which was published in 1810, and attained very extensive popularity. The second volume of his Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind appeared in 1813; and in the end of 1815 that Dissertation on the Progress of Metaphysical and Ethical Philosophy, which, originally written for the Supplement to this Encyclopædia, has now its place as the opening treatise of the present edition. He published nothing further between that time and the year 1822, when he suffered a severe stroke of palsy. But his mind was unshaken and untouched; and his compositions after this time were as vigorous in every respect as those which had preceded. The third volume of the Elements was published in 1827, and in 1828, a few weeks only before his death, his view of the Active and Moral Powers of Man was given to the world, in two volumes octavo. On the 11th of June 1828, he died at Edinburgh, in the seventy-fifth year of his age, and was buried in the Canongate church-yard. A monument to his memory, erected by his friends and admirers, and successfully imitated from one of the most
beautiful structures of Athens, forms a prominent object on the Calton Hill.1 (B. L.)
STEWART'S Islands, a cluster of small, low islands, in the South Pacific Ocean, discovered by Captain Hunter in 1791. They are five in number. Long. 163. 18. E. Lat. 8. 26. S.