# Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Bowen, Francis

Edition of 1900.
​BOWEN, Francis, author, b. in Charlestown, Mass., 8 Sept., 1811; d. in Boston, Mass., 22 Jan., 1890. He was graduated at Harvard, and was instructor there in intellectual philosophy and political economy. In 1839 he went to Europe, and, while living in Paris, met Sismondi, De Gerando, and other scholars. He returned to Cambridge in 1841 and devoted himself to literature. In January, 1843, he became editor and proprietor ​of the “North American Review,” which he conducted nearly eleven years, writing, during this time, about one fourth of the articles in it. In 1848 and 1849 he delivered lectures before the Lowell institute, on the application of metaphysical and ethical science to the evidences of religion. During the latter part of Mr. Bowen's connection with the “North American Review” attention was attracted by his articles on the Hungarian question, of which he did not take the popular side, and on account of these, together with his views on other political subjects, the Harvard overseers failed to confirm his appointment as McLean professor of history, made by the corporation in 1850. (See Carter, Robert.) In the winter of this year he lectured again before the Lowell institute on political economy, and in 1852 on the origin and development of the English and American constitutions. In 1853, on the election of Dr. Walker to the presidency of Harvard, Mr. Bowen was appointed his successor in the Alford professorship of natural religion, moral philosophy, and civil polity, and was this time almost unanimously confirmed by the overseers. Since 1858 he lectured before the Lowell institute on the English metaphysicians and philosophers from Bacon to Sir William Hamilton. Prof. Bowen opposed in his philosophical works the systems of Kant, Fichte, Cousin, Comte, and John Stuart Mill, who has replied to his critic in the third edition of his “Logic.” In political economy he opposed the doctrines of Adam Smith on free-trade, Malthus on population, and Ricardo on rent. He took pains to trace the influence of our form of government and condition of society upon economical questions. Prof. Bowen published “Virgil, with English Notes,” and “Critical Essays on the History and Present Condition of Speculative Philosophy” (Boston, 1842); “Lowell Institute Lectures” (1849; revised ed., 1855); an abridged edition of Dugald Stewart's “Philosophy of the Human Mind” (1854); “Documents of the Constitution of England and America, from Magna Charta to the Federal Constitution of 1789” (Cambridge, 1854); the lives of Steuben, Otis, and Benjamin Lincoln, in Sparks's “American Biography”; “Principles of Political Economy, applied to the Condition, Resources, and Institutions of the American People” (Boston, 1856); a revised edition of Reeve's translation of De Tocqueville's “Democracy in America” (2 vols., Cambridge, 1862); a “Treatise on Logic” (1864); “American Political Economy,” with remarks on the finances since the beginning of the civil war (New York, 1870); “Modern Philosophy, from Descartes to Schopenhauer and Hartmann” (1877); “Gleanings from a Literary Life, 1838-1880” (1880); and “A Layman's Study of the English Bible, considered in its Literary and Secular Aspect” (1886).