Dugald Stewart Quotes

When once we quit the basis of sensation, all is in the wind. To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, Tracy, and Stewart. {Letter to John Adams, from Monticello, 15 August 1820}

And for the next two years he read more or less continuously the writings of the Scottish philosophers of common sense, Adam Smith, Thomas Brown, James Mackintosh, Thomas Reid, and especially Dugald Stewart. One of Emerson’s students later remembered that the way to please the young schoolmaster was to praise Dugald Stewart. Scottish Common Sense philosophy was the prevailing mode of thought at Emerson’s Harvard. It

Donaldson's Hospital in Edinburgh, of which great things were expected, fails to excite even a passing remark; while the High School, the fragments of the National Monument, Dugald Stewart's Monument, Surgeon's Hall, and the Institution on the Mound, continue to illuminate their respective localities with the light of truth and beauty, giving to our northern metropolis an air of refinement which no other city in the kingdom possesses.