Benjamin Rand was a Canadian bibliographer in the field of philosophy.
Background
Benjamin Rand was born on July 17, 1856 in Canning, Nova Scotia, the third child and eldest son of the five children of Ebenezer and Ann Isabelle (Eaton) Rand. His ancestry went back to Robert Rand, who was in Charlestown, Massachussets, before 1636. Descendants of Robert lived in Nantucket and received grants of land in Cornwallis, Nova Scotia, in 1764, when settlements by New Englanders were established there.
Education
Benjamin received his early education at Horton Academy and subsequently attended Acadia College (later Acadia University) in Nova Scotia, where, in 1875, he received the degree of A. B. In 1877 he enrolled as a student in Harvard University, receiving there a second bachelor's degree in 1879, and, in 1880, the degree of A. M. From 1882 to 1885, having been awarded the Walker Fellowship, he studied philosophy at Heidelberg under Kuno Fischer, the historian of philosophy. Upon his return to the United States, he received in 1885 the degree of Ph. D. in philosophy, this being the third time that the degree had been awarded in that department of Harvard.
Career
From 1885 with the exception of the short period (1888 - 89) in which he served as instructor in English at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he was officially associated with the Harvard philosophical department. From 1897 to 1902 he occupied the post of instructor and in 1906 he was appointed librarian of the philosophical library of Harvard University at Emerson Hall.
This post he held until 1933, and was thereafter librarian emeritus. The influence which he exerted on the formation of the philosophy section of Widener Library at Harvard was considerable, and the development of the Robbins Philosophical Library in Emerson Hall was in large measure inspired by his efforts. He built up this library from a few hundred to over forty thousand volumes.
His Bibliography of Philosophy, Psychology and Cognate Subjects, in two volumes, was published in 1905 after years of labor and constituted the last two volumes of J. M. Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology. At the time of its appearance this work was regarded by librarians as a major contribution.
His custom was to spend his summers abroad, frequently in England. While there, he obtained access to the library of the Earl of Lovelace and thus came upon the 1671 version of Locke's Essay Concerning the Understanding, Knowledge, Opinion, and Assent. Rand was of the opinion, expressed in his introduction to the Essay, that this version was the original draft of Locke's treatise. This contention has turned out to have been mistaken, a still earlier draft - though probably not the original one - having been subsequently discovered in that same Lovelace collection.
Rand died in his seventy-ninth year on the farm in Nova Scotia where he was born.