PIRIE, W.R. An Inquiry into the Constitution, Powers, and Processes of the Human Mind, with a view to the determination of the Fundamental Principles of Religious, Moral, and Political Science. Aberdeen: A. Brown & Co. 1858.

PIRIE, W.R. An Inquiry into the Constitution, Powers, and Processes of the Human Mind, with a view to the determination of the Fundamental Principles of Religious, Moral, and Political Science. Aberdeen: A. Brown & Co. 1858.

xv, 640 pp., some marginal water-staining, untrimmed and partly unopened. Recent cloth. First edition.

William Robinson Pirie (1804-1885) was given the Chair of Divinity and Church history when Marischal and King's Colleges, Aberdeen, were united in 1860, and became Principal in 1876. He was an influential figure in the Church of Scotland. His 'Inquiry into the Constitution .....' offers a historical and critical review of what he termed 'the progress of spiritual philosophy'. In it he embraced the view that the soul is a separate substance and, accordingly, sought to defend a Lockean view of personal identity (with its emphasis on memory as a criterion of personal identity) from the criticisms made by Reid. This first book may have been the by-product of a course of lectures and was written, so its author professed, so as to be intelligible to his students. Stuart Brown in Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Philosophers.