be allowed to vote who could not work out a sum in the "rule of three." But his must be a very keen eye that can detect a fallacy in his logic, or a flaw in the texture of his mental philosophy. The most difficult themes he handles with the ease of a master. So full is his consciousness of power, and so competent his knowledge, that he dares to walk without the least disguise or affectation over that domain, the frequenters whereof play the chameleon on principle. He writes on philosophical questions like a man of business; gets as near as he can to the naked thought; presses the thought close against fact; uses the simplest words, and believes in the possibility of reaching the bottom of things by the honest use of reason. For this cause, his writings, however abstruse and profound, are always interesting.

The volumes before us contain scarcely more than a series of notes on the philosophical points discussed in the writings of Sir William Hamilton, and of criticisms on his mode of treating them. They do not constitute a philosophical work: but are more like studies for such a work, which we hope, and are almost tempted to predict, that the author has in contemplation. For Mr. Mill thinks on long lines; the action of his mind is systematic, continuous, exhaustive. It is not his way to leave questions half-answered; and we shall decline to receive this collection of "Remarks," as even so much as the outline sketch of a system of philosophy. We regard them as intended to do a work which is incidental to the statement of a new system; the work, namely, of preparing the ground by the removal of rubbish. His business here is the summary exposure and radical extermination of fallacies; and the work is done effectually, once and for all time.

Mr. Mill takes up Sir William Hamilton, not because he is weak, but because he is strong; because he is the strongest man whose name is associated with the views he writes to

pass judgment on. The philosophy appears in him at its best. Mr. Mill prefers, therefore, assailing it under the statement made by Sir William, than under any statement that he could make himself; his only regret being, that Sir William, being dead, cannot meet his objections, or give him the benefit

of his criticisms in return. How Sir William would have met this terrible opponent, we never shall know. To us, it seems as if encounter would be useless. Not only are we sensible of something like mortification, in that we esteemed Sir William so great a philosopher: we find ourselves doubting if he was a philosopher at all, in the noble sense of the word.

We did fancy, before reading this book, that we had a tolerably accurate idea of the Hamiltonian Philosophy. Its grand features, at least, were sufficiently familiar. We were acquainted with its founder's famous critique on Cousin, wherein he laid assault to the very citadel of the philosophy of the absolute and infinite; and we had had for years on our shelf his edition of Reid, with notes and dissertations, wherein, accepting substantially the basis of the system of "common sense," he attempted to rear an edifice thereupon, more consistent and complete than the Scotchman was able to construct. We had considered ourselves well grounded in his "great axiom," that all our human knowledge is of things relative and phenomenal; that of things as existing in and for themselves, without relation to us or our faculties,- of things absolute, we know and can know nothing; be they external, be they internal, be they material, intellectual, or spiritual; the existence of them being purely an inference from such appearances as our faculties can take cognizance of. With the Hamiltonian doctrine of "The Conditioned," which imports that all we can positively think lies between two opposite poles of thought, which, as excluding each other, cannot both be true, but of which one or the other must be, we believed ourselves acquainted. Mr. Mansel, Sir William's eager disciple, made these two dogmas of the Relative and the Conditioned somewhat notorious by his Essay on "The Limits of Religious Thought." We had associated the name of Sir William Hamilton with the opinion that Consciousness is the recognition, by the mind, of its own acts and affections, and of nothing beside, whether in the heavens above, in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth; whether things past, present, or to come; material or spiritual. We had held him responsible for a peculiar theory of Causation which implied that the very idea of

Causation was inconceivable; and for a vigorous defence of the belief in Free Will, grounded in his philosophy of the Conditioned.

But, from these volumes, it appears that we have all along been ascribing opinions to Sir William which he never consistently held. It appears that he either never held, or that he after a time ceased to hold, the famous doctrine of the Relativity of Human Knowledge; inasmuch as, while emphatically asserting it in some passages, in others "he repudiated it in every sense which makes it other than a barren truism."

It appears that he takes back in detail what he has affirmed in general, and reposes arguments on bases which he himself discarded when stating and arguing his Philosophy of the Conditioned. It appears that he taught two different, inconsistent, and opposite doctrines of Consciousness; one, that it is synonymous with immediate or intuitive knowledge, and that we are conscious not merely of our own state of mind, but of outward objects; not merely of sensations, but of certain qualities in things;—another, that Consciousness is simply the mind's recognition of its own acts and feelings. In respect to Causation, it appears that, while he professes to explain the phenomenon of Causality, he begins by emptying the phenomenon of all that requires explanation: and, while defending the doctrine of Free Will, he "as is often the case (and it is one of the best things he does) saves his opponents the trouble of answering his friends."

Mr. Mill brings terrible charges against the great philosopher. He accuses him of being rather a polemic than a connected thinker; a man who, "if he can only seize on something which will strike a hard blow at an opponent, seldom troubles himself how much of his own edifice may be knocked down by the shock." He alleges of him, that he rejected doctrines, not because he had examined them and found them wanting, but without examining them; that "the character of his whole Philosophy seems to have been determined by the requirements of the doctrine of Free Will; to which doctrine he clung, because he had persuaded himself that it

afforded the only premises from which human reason could deduce the doctrines of Natural Religion."-"Instead of having reasoned out a consistent scheme of thought," says his critic, "of which every part fits in with the other parts, he seems to have explored the deeper regions of the mind only at the points which had some direct connection with the conclusions he had adopted on a few special questions of Philosophy; and from his different explorations he occasionally brought back different results."

Mr. Mill even has the audacity to dispute Sir William's claim to omniscience. He dares to say that he knows little or nothing of Science; that he is wholly unacquainted with Applied Mathematics, not understanding so much as the meaning of the phrase; and that he makes serious mistakes in the department of knowledge with which he is most familiar, namely, the History of Philosophical Speculation. charges are not merely advanced: they are substantiated by abundant quotations. It will be long before Sir William's reputation recovers from the blow dealt upon it by his great countryman, if it ever does.

These

But Mr. Mill is not striving for victory over an opponent, however famous. He is striving for the truth. He would not have laid a finger on Hamilton's renown, if his renown had not been associated with doctrines which he believed to be false, and the error of which he thought himself competent to expose. And yet we must qualify this statement by saying, that his quarrel, after all, is not so directly with the essential character and main drift of Hamilton's Philosophy, as with Hamilton himself. He accepts heartily-of course, with reservations on details of argument and statement the substance of Hamilton's critique on Cousin and the Transcendentalists. He shares, also, with suitable reservations, his admiration for Reid. The famous doctrine of the Relativity of Knowledge he holds, under his own definition, to be fundamental and precious. With some of Sir William's expressions respecting Consciousness he cordially agrees. His complaint is, that Sir William does not comprehend the scope, or follow the leading, of his own essential principles.

Mr. Mill is a thinker of what is called in the modern speech the Psychological School, to which belong also Prof. Bain of Aberdeen, and Herbert Spencer. Under the old classification, he would be called a Sensationalist as distinguished from a Transcendentalist; but Speculative Philosophy has made such immense gains, during the past generation, in method as well as in material, that the old nomenclature fails to do any thing but misrepresent. The Transcendentalist Philosophy is the main object of attack; and in these volumes he means to hunt it out of its last refuge, and to kill its last spawn in the writings of one of its foremost antagonists in this century. Its citadel he supposes carried: he is concerned now to sweep it out of the cellars. It is confessedly dead: in this work he fumigates the garments of those who have aided in laying out the corpse. Every chapter of these volumes throws a light into some dark corner of Sir William's writings where the heresy lurks, and makes the presence of it apparent. The chapters on "The Doctrine of Concepts or General Notions," on Judgment, on Reasoning, on the Conception of Logic as a Science, on the Hamiltonian Theory of Pleasure and Pain, on Sir William's Opinions on the Study of Mathematics, are loaded and aimed with the same deadly purpose of assault on some ghost of Transcendentalism. It often seems for a moment as if the remorseless critic was losing scent of his trail and wandering aimlessly in some by-path, attracted by the love of logical play with so accomplished a dialectician; but it is no such thing: he has scented the odious doctrine on some button of Sir William's coat, and he springs at it. The trail is taken up again, on the instant.

Though professedly a work of criticism, and not of exposition, the writer ventures enough of exposition to make the leading features of his own system plain. In opposition to Cousin, who states it as the problem of philosophy to ascertain just what Consciousness actually tells us, postponing any attempt at framing a theory concerning the origin of any of the facts of Consciousness, till the sum of them has been carefully noted, Mr. Mill declares that "the origin of our ideas" is the main stress of the problem of mental science,