 Hamilton's published relatively little during his lifetime, and though two volumes of lectures appeared after his death, his philosophical views can be adequately ascertained from three long essays that he wrote for the Edinburgh Review—“The Philosophy of the Unconditioned” (1829), “The Philosophy of Perception” (1830) and “Logic” (1833), subsequently republished in a collection of his papers. In the first of these Hamilton recounts the course philosophy had taken in France after “the philosophy of Descartes and Malebranche had sunk into oblivion” (Hamilton 1853, 2). It began with the emergence of a highly materialist version of Lockean empiricism “a doctrine so melancholy in its consequences, and founded on principles thus partial and exaggerated, [that it] could not be permanent” (ibid., 3). Rescue came from two sources. The first of these was the Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense which showed that there are mental phenomena that cannot be interpreted as any form of sensation and that “intelligence supposes principles, which, as conditions of its activity, cannot be the results of its operation” (ibid., 3 emphasis original). The other source of renewal was German philosophy after Kant, and in particular the Absolute Idealism that was “founded by Fichte, but evolved by Schelling” (ibid., 6). “The Philosophy of the Unconditioned” is ostensibly a review of Victor Cousin's Course de Philosophie, which had been published in Paris the previously year (1828), but the ‘review’ is chiefly important in its providing an occasion for Hamilton to formulate his own solution to the tension between the philosophy of common sense and the way of ideas.