HAMILTON VERSUS MILL. 
 
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 A THOROUGH DISCUSSION 
 
 OF EACH CHAPTER IN 
 
 Mr. fohn S. Mill's Examination of 
 Hamilton s Logic and Philosophy 
 
 BEGINNING WITH 
 
 THE LOGIC 
 
 PART I.—ON CHAPTERS XVII. XVIII. AND XIX. 
 
 EDINBURGH: MACLACHLAN & STEWART 
 
 BOOKSELLERS TO THE UNIVERSITY. 
 
 RIVINGTONS, LONDON, OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE. 
 
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‘Now Jack was a boy of a bold temper .’—Popular Tales. 
 
 ''•When the Justices of Cornwall (read Vienna) heard of this valiant action, 
 
 ‘ they sent for Jack, and declared that he should always be called Jack the 
 ‘ Giant-Killer.’— Ibid. 
 
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 eiKos 9jv yevtadou abro’ . . . eycb Se olov re iyiyvero X^w.— Thucyd. ii. 48. 
 
 EDINBURGH : T. CONSTABLE, 
 
 PRINTER TO THE QUEEN, AND TO THE UNIVERSITY. 
 
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 All who take an interest in the doctrines of Logic and Meta- 
 physics now held by the great majority of those who think with 
 depth and energy, and in the fame of the great Hamilton who has 
 expounded them or discovered them or matured them, cannot but 
 rejoice to see the languid attention of the community (attention 
 being all the evidence these doctrines need) reanimated by the 
 somewhat enigmatical inburst of Mr. Mill’s strange book among us. 
 
 A writer of considerable ability upon one subject, and of suffi¬ 
 cient eloquence and popularity to be listened to upon any, has 
 undertaken, on behalf, undisguisedly, of the semi-philosophical 
 party, now known as Rationalists, to examine Hamilton, and to 
 declare against him,—against his doctrines and against his fame. 
 The result, however, reminds one a good deal of Balaam and 
 Balak. The Rationalists may well exclaim, ‘We took thee to 
 ‘ curse our enemy; and, behold, thou hast blessed him altogether.’ 
 If it had been possible to remove Hamilton from his throne in the 
 world of thought, if it had been possible to detect even the 
 appearance of a flaw in any portion of the doctrines which he pro¬ 
 claimed, Mr. Mill would have done it. The intention, the party- 
 need, and the stage-effects were present. But the attempt has 
 entirely failed. Whatever he may have done against himself, 
 against Hamilton he has done 'nothing. There was nothing that 
 he could do. The great torch of the great man’s philosophy 
 remains as bright as ever; nay, as his own motto predicts, shines 
 like all truth, all the brighter for the shaking it has had. 
 
 Mr. Mill’s work, whose Rationalistic purpose is avowed at page 
 34, where it describes Hamilton’s anti-Rationalism as extremely 
 dangerous, and in chapter vii., where this description obtains more 
 
 A 
 
 40900 
 
 I 
 
 H 1191 
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
9 
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 detail,.is merely a hostile review-article of 560 octavo pages, which 
 has, in its author’s hands, fallen into such an arrangement that, 
 while he professes in it to differ from Hamilton upon almost 
 everything that Hamilton has written, he distinctly indicates his 
 agreement with him, chapter by chapter, upon every one of these 
 points, in the very same volume, and this to such an extent, that 
 the uninitiated reader rises from the perusal of the book, wondering 
 what all this coarse and clumsy condemnation means where, it is 
 admitted by the critic, there is nothing to condemn. The drift of 
 each chapter is as follows:—‘I next proceed to expose the very 
 ‘ grave errors of our author upon this all-important theory. I 
 ‘ need scarcely say, however, that upon all the main points of it I 
 4 am entirely with Sir W. Hamilton, whose view is that of almost 
 ‘ all our thinking men, although there is something exceedingly 
 ‘ flagitious in so eminent a man’s altering and adding to the 
 ‘ ordinary expressions, in some cases without any very obvious 
 ‘ purpose or result, and something exceedingly shallow in so pro- 
 ‘ found a thinker’s being unable to discern the full import of the 
 ' most valuable doctrines as understood by others. But what are 
 
 * we to expect from one who was always busying himself with the 
 
 * thoughts of others, and who devoted himself so immensely to the 
 ‘ history* of philosophical thought, as Sir W. Hamilton did, and 
 £ who seemed, like him, to think a great deal more about ascer- 
 ‘ taining what he could honestly regard as true, than about estab- 
 ‘ lishing a system of his own. As to the minor points of his 
 ‘ theory, we are compelled to dissent from him entirely, unless, 
 ‘ indeed, we suppose that his words mean rather what his admirers 
 ‘ hold them to mean than what they can appear to “ connote” in 
 ‘ his opponent’s eyes; for the mere verbal difference is here of the 
 ‘ greatest moment. In short, although he is one of the master 
 ‘ spirits of the century, of amazing acuteness, elevation, and 
 ‘ research, he is, I apprehend, one of the poorest and shallowest 
 ‘ thinkers we have ever had.’ I do not profess to give the precise 
 words, but such is the burthen of Mr. Mill’s song—the senseless 
 and unvarying oscillations—recurring ad nauseam, aided by the art 
 and slang of the mere review writer, throughout each of the twenty- 
 eight chapters of the work, the upshot of the whole being one huge 
 but most curious and unexpected panegyric. A writer thought by 
 his own party, and even beyond the limits of his own party, to be 
 a person of considerable ability, proceeds, he tells us, under the 
 
PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 3 
 
 strongest impulse of antagonism, to ‘ bring down’ Hamilton (as he 
 expresses the operation), and fails to do it,—owns that he fails! 
 owns that it is only in the eyes of the ignorant he is able even to 
 seem to triumph ! What is praise, if this is not praise ? 
 
 But this is not all. Our facts open up, it will be seen, another 
 and a stranger vista still. Mr. Mill’s pages betray to us, and not, 
 apparently, as if he sought to hide it from the learned, that this 
 mere semblance of a victory over Hamilton in the eyes of unphilo- 
 sophical people not only is all the result he professes to have 
 obtained, but was all the result he had aimed at from the first—all 
 he had hoped for—in publishing his book ! 
 
 1. One of the facts to which I now allude is this : Without a 
 single exception, every statement made against Hamilton’s doctrines 
 in this volume is utterly groundless. 
 
 Of Mr. Mill’s critics who have preceded me, some have pointed 
 out that some of his statements were inaccurate, others that others 
 were so ; and these critics have reasonably inferred that upon these 
 points he was mistaken, some of them hinting at a certain animus 
 betrayed in his pages, which seemed to them to have contributed 
 to mislead him. That is all very well for those who found him 
 making some successful hits, and making only a few misstatements. 
 They very properly called these misstatements ‘ errors/ and treated 
 them as errors, and regarded them as errors. But that is not the 
 case now laid before the public. That is not my case. If of the 
 twenty-six chapters, in each of which a proposition is maintained 
 against Hamilton, there is not a single one in which the proposi¬ 
 tion, so maintained, is not entirely inconsistent with fact—entirely 
 groundless, it is hardly competent to the critic to set up the theory 
 that Mr. Mill entertains so much animosity against Hamilton, and 
 has an understanding naturally so deficient that he has been led 
 by his want of understanding and excess of animosity to mistake 
 error for truth, to this grotesque extent, in every separate chapter, 
 and upon every separate proposition. This, I think, is going rather 
 far. It will not be supposed, after what I have written, that I 
 think too highly either of Mr. Mill’s information upon these sub 
 jects, or of his capacity for them, or of his generous feelings towards 
 Hamilton; but I think better of Mr. Mill than that alternative 
 implies—a great deal better; and I maintain that, since every 
 proposition against Hamilton in Mr. Mill’s book is, even upon the 
 simplest subjects, utterly groundless, utterly inconsistent with those 
 
4 
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 facts which Mr. Mill himself admits, the only reasonable view that 
 we can take of matters is that he aimed at nothing more than a 
 practical joke in publishing his volume,—a mere sham triumph 
 over Hamilton in the eyes of those who understood neither him 
 nor Hamilton. I do not ask any one to take my word for the 
 utter groundlessness of every charge, and every chapter. This 
 groundlessness I have to prove, and the proof must be complete, 
 or it is nil. I only ask that, if the fact is as I state it, Mr. Mill’s 
 admirers will, as I am persuaded he himself will, do me the justice 
 to see that I act with a great deal more consideration and indul¬ 
 gence towards him, in interpreting his book as a jest, than those 
 do who would have me attribute to him all the ignorance, thick¬ 
 headedness, and malice that it would be necessary to suppose, in 
 order to account for such a book so written. 
 
 2. A second fact, which, even if the one just given were to be 
 allowed no weight, would of itself alone be sufficient to necessitate 
 the interpretation of Mr. Mill’s book as a mere jest, is this: Not 
 only is each proposition alleged against Hamilton utterly groundless, 
 but Mr. Mill himself admits, in the same volume, generally in the 
 same chapter , that it is so, admitting this either in express terms, as 
 he in most cases pretty frankly does (in the question, for instance, 
 whether we think with concepts or not, pp. 331, 341), or by taking 
 great pains to reduce all his criticism to a mere difference between 
 Hamilton’s words and his own, which difference, as he gives it, no 
 one can see, and which he knows that no one can see (as when he 
 says that to think with the ‘ concepts’ of words is a more circuitous 
 expression than to think with their ‘significations,’ pp. 331, 332). 
 Here, also, I am unconscious of any one exception to the rule. 
 Mr. Mill everywhere withdraws his proposition, as well as asserts it; 
 and what I ask is, not that any one should suppose, without the 
 clearest proof, that every proposition is withdrawn, but how it is 
 possible for us, if every proposition advanced against Hamilton is 
 withdrawn, to regard the work in any other light than as a jest. 
 
 These, then, are the two facts which I pledge myself to establish, 
 and I admit at once that, if I fail to do so in every particular, the 
 whole theory of a practical joke falls necessarily to the ground, and 
 that the ordinary theory of mistake and animus, or whatever other 
 truer names we may choose to call these things, mutually acting 
 and reacting upon each other, affords sufficient explanation of what 
 then requires to be explained. 
 
PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 5 
 
 I would fain impress well upon my reader’s mind that I am per¬ 
 fectly aware of the strangeness of the conclusion to which my facts 
 drive me, or, as I may otherwise express it, of the secret purpose 
 which the careful study of Mr. Mill’s book discloses. Nor is it 
 lightly that I have adopted this solution of the difficulty presented 
 by the vast extent to which the statements contained in it are 
 inconsistent with the most obvious facts. I am aware that, even 
 with the two facts as I find them, most critics would have recourse 
 to the ordinary expedient. Most of our most competent critics 
 would either be silent altogether, as so many now are, or would set 
 about accounting for these facts by assuming, secundum artem , a 
 sufficient want of intelligence and of good feeling to make it pos¬ 
 sible for such facts to coexist with a serious intention on the 
 author’s part. I am, however, as I have said, precluded from 
 taking this harsh view of the matter by the circumstance that such 
 a book as that now before us—a thick octavo of grotesque misre¬ 
 presentation and grotesque rebuke from beginning to end—would 
 require the hypothesis of mistake and animus upon too large a 
 scale,—upon a scale, in short, unprecedented; and this in the 
 present case is entirely out of the question. I have said this 
 already, I say it again, I cannot repeat it too often. Mr. Mill is, 
 I have every reason to believe, of too gentle a nature to entertain a 
 personal hatred to any one, much less to one of whom he could say, 
 as he does of Hamilton, that although an unsparing controversialist, 
 he never failed in candour, and never in his discussions aimed at 
 anything but at the establishment of what seemed to him to be 
 the truth. To attribute to any such hostile feeling, therefore, or 
 unfriendly bias (as the suppressio veri of these days teaches us to 
 call it), all or any of the misrepresentations of which this book 
 consists, would be simply impossible; and there is quite as much 
 to be said against imputing to Mr. Mill any of the thick-headed¬ 
 ness which here obtrudes itself upon us in almost every page. 
 Without drawing any inference from his popularity, which is great, 
 and which his clear style of English and his liberal ideas would be 
 sure to obtain for him, his understanding, to judge from his works 
 on Evidence and Political Economy, is considerably above the 
 average, far too much above it to warrant our ascribing to him all 
 the rubbish, and all the blundering of which he has so liberally taken 
 upon himself the odium in this volume. I, for my part, decline to 
 
6 
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 do it. Let others act as they think proper. I seek a more pro¬ 
 bable version of the facts than this. 
 
 The only plausible objection that can be suggested to supposing 
 Mr. Mill’s book a plaisanterie is that, if it were one, it would be a 
 mauvaise plaisanterie, since it would amount to not only the 
 grossest misrepresentation of one no longer present, who had 
 laboured long and faithfully and powerfully with us at our most 
 difficult problems, but also to a discouragement and entanglement, 
 which must necessarily throw back philosophy for at least half a 
 century. The answer to this is, that nothing of either kind can 
 possibly result from Mr. Mill’s comments upon Hamilton any 
 more than if he had merely written on every one of the 560 pages 
 the words, ‘ Hamilton is all bosh,’ and that he knew it could not, 
 and that we need not, therefore, think of his jest as a mauvaise 
 'plaisanterie , however much it may look like one. He well knew 
 that his comments would neither represent nor misrepresent any ¬ 
 thing of Hamilton’s to those not conversant with such subjects, 
 and that to those who were, they did not constitute a contradiction 
 of Hamilton at all, but, on the contrary, if anything, a massive 
 confirmation ; for if one with Mr. Mill’s need could utter nothing 
 except empty words against our philosophy and its great expounder, 
 what stronger proof could have been given that there was nothing 
 else that could be uttered against it ? Mr. Mill’s very harmless 
 calculation seems to have been that the great majority of his 
 readers, not being able to judge for themselves, should infer, from 
 his air and manner, and learned words and obscure sentences, 
 that he knew all about it, and that he saw clearly that Hamilton 
 was wrong, and we all wrong with him; and he does not appear 
 to have miscalculated. But we need not call this a mauvaise 
 plaisanterie. 
 
 Another objection, but not a plausible one to the view thus 
 opened up to us, is that there is a large amount of personal ani¬ 
 mosity displayed everywhere throughout ‘ The Examination,’ which, 
 however much controlled in the earlier portion of the work, 
 degenerates towards the close into a perpetual growl, that so much 
 antagonism as this might easily cloud even the clearest under¬ 
 standing, or otherwise produce misstatement, and that, this being 
 the case, my hypothesis is unnecessary. To this I reply, that there 
 is undoubtedly a large show of bitterness and animosity over the^ 
 whole volume, which is by no means accounted for by the fact that 
 
PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 7 
 
 Hamilton never once alluded, in any way, either to Mr. Mill, or to 
 anything that Mr. Mill had written, nor by the further fact of 
 Hamilton’s having unfortunately quoted the work of Mr. James 
 Mill (the Critic’s able father) as an ‘ ingenious’ Treatise, which 
 epithet has, it seems, so calumnious an import in literature that 
 Mr. Mill junior is indignant (see p. 256) at its being applied to his 
 father’s work,—as indignant, almost, as if his father also had never 
 been mentioned; nor is this accounted for by a process of literary 
 jealousy, for Hamilton and Mr. John Mill were never in the same 
 sphere of literature or thought,—the one being greatly the other’s 
 junior, and employed upon totally different subjects. But to me it is 
 evident that the bitterness in question is part of the joke. It is 
 a mere affectation, cleverly devised by Mr. Mill, to throw an air of 
 earnestness over his work, of which it very often stands in need. 
 His admirers, indeed, deny even the appearance of bitterness, assur¬ 
 ing us that what is mistaken for it is Mr. Mill’s ordinary, most cour¬ 
 teous, and pleasant manner of writing controversially, and that he 
 meant nothing by it but extreme politeness. This seems incredible, 
 but it may be so. I must observe, however, that if this appearance 
 of extreme personal discontent were absent, the work would appear 
 to every one to be rather a tissue of odd praise, than, as these 
 friends describe it, a tissue of courteous condemnation. 
 
 The only other objection I need advert to, is that respecting the 
 cui bono. ‘ But why should Mr. Mill have done such a thing as 
 ‘ this ?’ will be one of the first questions put; ‘ What earthly reason 
 ‘ could he have had for doing it?’ just as people asked the other 
 day in the Pritchard case. The answer to this is, that his object 
 in writing his book in jest was, most probably—let us say most 
 certainly—the same as his object in writing the book at all; and 
 he himself tells us distinctly why he wrote the book. He wrote it 
 because he considered the Anti-Rationalism which he detected in 
 Hamilton’s writings ‘ extremely mischievous,’ even in Hamilton’s 
 hands, but, as applied by Mr. Mansel, a good deal worse than ex¬ 
 tremely mischievous; in fact, so bad, that the new champion of 
 the Rationalists would rather ‘ go to hell,’ he tells us, than sanction 
 such a doctrine. To render unpopular, therefore, with unphiloso- 
 phical people the source of a philosophy which he and others 
 looked upon as so injurious to morals and religion, seems to have 
 been the whole cui bono of the matter,—the object of his having so 
 courageously incurred the odium and discredit of writing an entire 
 
8 
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 volume of burlesque statements as truths in Logic and Philosophy. 
 
 * The Examination’ of British Philosophy and of Hamilton thus turns 
 out to have been written with a moral and religious purpose; but to be, 
 nevertheless, a mere party trick, a frolic, a sort of pious fraud, set on 
 loot by Mr. Mill to ingratiate himself with the Rationalists, in order, 
 it would seem, to enter Christendom at their gate; the immediate 
 aim of the trick being to make Mr. Mansel appear as much as pos ¬ 
 sible in the light of a defeated champion, he being by far the most 
 formidable opponent of the Rationalists, as we may gather from all 
 the virulence and irritation with which they have assailed him. To 
 bring about an appearance—even if it were but an appearance—so de¬ 
 sirable, it was thought safer and more effective to attack his Philoso¬ 
 phy in its source, and he being avowedly the disciple of Hamilton, as 
 far as one great man can be the disciple of another, it recommended 
 itself to Mr. Mill’s judgment, as the greatest service he could render 
 to his new platform, to publish this rationalistic squib, overthrowing 
 Hamilton, at least to all appearance, through our British Philosophy 
 so well expounded by him, and making mince-meat of all he ever 
 wrote ; for, if Hamilton was nothing, argued these wiseacres, Mr. 
 Mansel could be nothing. And for this work, Mr. Mill was all the 
 better qualified, from the circumstance that he had no philosophical 
 reputation or status to lose by doing it, and that he was neverthe¬ 
 less popular enough to be regarded as an oracle by the multitude— 
 even in philosophy. For what does the multitude know of philo¬ 
 sophy ? But how was it to be done ? Hamilton, as well as Mansel, 
 is a giant; ay, and of the two * the elder and more terrible.’ How 
 was one but little versed in Metaphysics, however expert he might 
 be supposed to be in Logic, to overthrow one of the greatest Meta¬ 
 physicians and Logicians of all time, especially when, as far as he 
 had any knowledge at all in either department, Mr. Mill also was 
 himself, a follower and pupil, either consciously or unconsciously, 
 voluntarily or involuntarily, of that illustrious man ? It could not 
 be done. There was no use in trying to effect anything in that 
 direction. Matters might, however, be so contrived, that it should 
 seem to be done. Ah, yes, should seem. The modern Jack might 
 seem to kill his Giant. This is the task which, in the cause of 
 Rationalism, Mr. John S. Mill has set himself to accomplish; and 
 he works thus:—He creates as complete a chaos of pleadings 
 special, and of terms philosophical, as he finds practicable, and 
 when he has brought things to such a pass that, in the midst of 
 
PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 9 
 
 the dust so raised, he can seem to he saying one thing while he is 
 really saying its opposite, and seem to he doing one thing while he 
 is only doing another, he takes advantage of the confusion to seem 
 to he striking fierce blows at his giant, when, in reality, he is not 
 touching his giant at all, nor able to touch him.. Such, every 
 reader of ‘ The Examination ’ can satisfy himself, is the natural 
 history of this eccentric and frolicsome volume, in which we find 
 self-contradiction upon every point which it asserts, and which, 
 innocent as it is in itself, must, to some extent at least, remain for 
 ever a discredit to the enlightenment of these days; for would 
 it have been written, men will justly ask hereafter, if it was to 
 have been read by a well-informed public ? Would any one have 
 attempted to pass off such a set of statements upon a cultivated 
 age? 
 
 I have now explained the grounds upon which it appears to me 
 to be far more reasonable, and even more generous to Mr. Mill, to 
 regard ‘ The Examination’ as a feigned attack upon Hamilton, than 
 to regard it as a serious one, Mr. Mill having been reduced to the 
 necessity of adopting this expedient of a sham from having dis¬ 
 covered (unexpectedly, it would appear) that there was nothing in 
 Hamilton that admitted of being otherwise attacked,—nothing that 
 was really assailable. And I have said that, whether the attack is 
 looked upon as a sham or as a real one, there is matter of much 
 congratulation and triumph for those who do not hold the philo¬ 
 sophy of Mr. Mill’s party, and who do hold Hamilton’s, in the very 
 unequivocal acknowledgment thus in either case afforded, on the 
 part of so popular and intelligent a writer as Mr. Mill, that our 
 Anti-Rationalistic Philosophy and its renowned expositor are upon 
 all points unassailable. I should not, however, wish it to be sup¬ 
 posed that, when I speak thus highly of Mr. Mill (and I do so most 
 sincerely), I am one of those who mistake popularity and intelli¬ 
 gence for philosophical prowess; and it is well to disabuse our 
 minds of this confusion before dealing with such a book as his. 
 Even in the account given of him by those who think most highly 
 of his ability, there is nothing to mislead us upon this point. The 
 questions now under discussion arise in Logic and Philosophy. On 
 neither subject has Mr. Mill evinced research; for neither, predi¬ 
 lection. Neither subject has ever occupied his pen at all; nor has 
 he ever done anything that could even suggest the possibility of his 
 being a judge upon either subject. On this point there is a great 
 
10 
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 deal of misconception abroad respecting Mr. Mill’s own pretensions. 
 He wrote two very pleasing and instructive volumes in his earlier 
 days on the various kinds of Evidence, viz., Analogy, Chances, In¬ 
 duction, etc., in which he mentions how much assistance he derived 
 from Dr. Whewell’s great works upon the Sciences. He called 
 this production ‘ a System of Logic,’ which, however, it was not in 
 any sense; nor had it anything whatever connected with Logic in 
 it, except a few pages in the first volume, with merely a brief sum¬ 
 mary of the ordinary principles, referring his readers for particulars 
 to ‘ existing Treatises/ The work itself only dealt with the truth of 
 our Assumptions or Beliefs either in daily life or in the Sciences, 
 and with the best means of determining which of these Assump¬ 
 tions are to be relied on, and which not. This sort of Art being as 
 necessary to the fishwoman as to the astronomer, is, of course, im¬ 
 mensely more extensive in its uses, or, as Mr. Mill expresses it, a 
 ‘ Larger’ Art than Logic is ; for Logic merely treats of what is a 
 priori or necessary in this exceedingly extensive Art. Such was 
 Mr. Mill’s work, miscalled ‘ a System of Logic and notwithstand¬ 
 ing Hamilton’s silence respecting it, on account, no doubt, of its 
 being entirely outside the domain of Logic, Mr. Mill enjoys a v fair 
 reputation, especially among Materialists, as the writer of these 
 volumes upon the Principles of Evidence. He has also bestowed 
 much careful and useful thought upon some branches of Political 
 Economy; and this is his special subject—his forte; although even 
 upon this subject many of his other conclusions are as much con¬ 
 troverted as his Female Franchise Theory and his Malthusian or 
 Anti-Marriage Theory. On these subjects he has written much, 
 and with great ability. On Metaphysics, or the Higher Philo¬ 
 sophy, commonly called, 'par excellence , Philosophy, he has never 
 written at all; and not that only. He has all his life through 
 studiously avoided its discussions, as studiously as he has in the 
 work upon Evidence above alluded to, and has never been known, 
 either in private life, or before the world, as a student—no, not even 
 as a reviewer—of those great questions at which men work, under 
 that unpopular name. We cannot, therefore, wonder to find that, 
 mixed up with all his affected misapprehension of Hamilton, Mr. 
 Mill labours under a large amount of misapprehension of him, and 
 of other philosophers, which is thoroughly genuine and unaffected. 
 Whatever allowance we may make for his not being in earnest, he 
 betrays in every page of what he has written not only an insuffi- 
 
PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 11 
 
 cient acquaintance with the propositions and the terms before him, 
 but something that looks extremely like a native inaptitude or in¬ 
 capacity for all such inquiries; and (which, however, is less to be 
 wondered at) of those who look upon him as in earnest, there are 
 few indeed, even among Materialists and Eationalists, who are not 
 secretly surprised to see no more than what appears to them the 
 present paltry quibbling, put forward as a first Essay in Meta 
 physics by the son of the able Philosopher to whom we are in¬ 
 debted for the ‘ Analysis of the Human Mind/ 
 
 To conclude these preliminary remarks. The reader sees clearly 
 that the main point is not, after all, to determine whether Mr. Mill 
 is in earnest or not. He sees clearly that what I undertake to do 
 is to prove to his complete satisfaction— 
 
 1. That everywhere Mr. Mill’s statement against Hamilton is 
 groundless; 
 
 2. That everywhere Mr. Mill himself admits it is go. 
 
 This is what I have to make clearly out. This is what the 
 reader has to determine whether I have made out or not; and that 
 I am not unlihely to be able to do so, even the more sceptical may 
 at least suspect when they find one of the most indulgent and most 
 able of Mr. Mill’s critics—himself an eminent philosopher, and 
 pronouncing Mr. Mill one—pointing out to him how he mistakes 
 everything,—to what an extent he (Mr. Mill) is in his own book 
 unconsciously assenting to the very doctrines he is there opposing, 
 —to what an extent he introduces us to ‘ self-contradictions in 
 ‘ Hamilton’ which do not exist at all—mere phantoms of his ima - 
 gination—to what an extent he misunderstands Hamilton, how 
 entirely insufficient the depth of thought is which he employs upon 
 these subjects, and how perplexing a task it is for his critics to make 
 his critical judgment, if taken seriously, harmonize in these matters 
 with common sense. Professor Eraser writes in the North British 
 Review for last September, long before any other criticism had ap¬ 
 peared :—‘ Mr. Mill in many places, in the logical as in the meta- 
 ‘ physical chapters, so it seems to us, exaggerates his own differences 
 ‘ with Sir W. Hamilton, and Sir W. Hamilton’s inconsistencies with 
 ‘ himself \ —and sometimes by a misconception of the Hamiltonian 
 ‘ meaning.’ And again—‘ But if what seems, on a superficial 
 ‘ interpretation, to be a shallow truism, is found to be a profound 
 ‘ truth, .... and if the chief alleged contradictions disappear , and 
 ‘ the essential Hamiltonian theory, so far as it goes, is found to be, 
 
12 
 
 PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 1 at any rate, one with itself, and largely capable of assimilation with 
 ‘ the best ideas of this age, we must respectfully ask Mr. Mill to 
 ‘ consider whether this critical judgment truly forecasts the place 
 ‘ that is to be finally adjudged by the philosophical world to Sir 
 ‘ W. Hamilton/ . . . The italics are mine ; and the only conclu¬ 
 sion that I ask the reader to recognise as following from such 
 remarks made by one of Mr. Mill’s most enlightened and most 
 indulgent critics is, that what is there stated as being true with 
 regard to many of Mr. Mill’s statements may not impossibly be 
 true of all. That it is true of all is what I pledge myself to prove, 
 having carefully ascertained that it is so. 
 
 The judgment of the Westminster Review for the January of this 
 year is the only other criterion I need suggest of what is not impos¬ 
 sible or unlikely in this respect. 
 
 The reviewer admits that he ‘ passes over’ many of Mr. Mill’s 
 charges against Hamilton without comment. Of those which he 
 adverts to, in no single one does he concur entirely with Mr. Mill, 
 in most of them very little, in many of them not at all; and one 
 of the latter is that very important one (‘ Examination,’ chap, vii.) 
 respecting the Divine Nature, and the meaning of the expression 
 Divine Goodness ; where the critic ably defends Mr. Mansel against 
 the preposterous comments of Mr. Mill, but evidently under an 
 impression that Mr. Mill was serious when he wrote them, which 
 mode of regarding them, adopted by so many critics, must of course 
 be of great assistance to Mr. Mill in the task to which he has com¬ 
 mitted himself. 
 
 These objections of this reviewer to Mr. Mill’s charges against 
 Hamilton are, be it remembered, from the pen of one who is pro¬ 
 fessedly not only a very partial critic, but one of Mr. Mill’s own 
 party. None else write in the Westminster Review; and as to the 
 charges contained in the three important chapters discussed in 
 Part I. of the present work, this reviewer’s words are as perfectly 
 explicit as upon all the rest, showing very clearly that, as far as even 
 these ‘ some of the best chapters in the volume ’ are concerned, it 
 is not at all unlikely that an impartial critic should be able to 
 prove that all Mr. Mill’s statements against Hamilton are utterly 
 groundless. 
 
 The reviewer writes thus :—‘When Mr. Mill says (p. 33), “ I 
 ‘ consider it nothing less than a misfortune that the words Con- 
 ‘ cept, General Notion, etc., should ever have been invented,” we 
 
PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
 
 13 
 
 ‘ dissent from his (Mr. Mill’s) opinion. ... We are more fully 
 ‘ in harmony with Mr. Mill in his two next chapters (c. xviii. et 
 ‘ seq.) on Judgment and Reasoning, which are among the best 
 ‘ chapters in the volume. . . . But we doubt the propriety of his 
 * calling this “ the Conceptualist theory,” since it has nothing to do 
 ‘ with Conceptualism in the special sense of antithesis to Realism 
 ‘ and Nominalism, but is, in fact, the theory of the syllogism as 
 ‘ given in the Analytics of Aristotle, and generally admitted since * 
 (p. 2S). 
 
 The reviewer, we see, here says that Mr. Mill is not only wrong 
 in the 18th and 19th chapters, when he accuses Hamilton of mix¬ 
 ing up something he calls Conceptualism with Judgments and 
 Reasoning (which is all that these chapters are written about), but 
 is also thereby placing himself in antagonism to all logicians since 
 the days of Aristotle. This does not look much like harmony, 
 fuller or less full, between Mr. Mill and his reviewer even in these 
 two chapters. Observe, however, further. The reviewer says he 
 does not agree at all with Mr. Mill in his charges against Hamilton 
 about General Concepts in the 17th chapter, but agrees with him 
 more fully on what he charges Hamilton with in the two next 
 chapters. But what is it to agree with a person more fully than 
 not at all ? The reader will understand this. And does not such 
 a state of things in the case of a partial critic and a partisan sug¬ 
 gest a very considerable probability that an impartial critic will be 
 able to prove, as I undertake to do, that there is not one single 
 charge of Mr. Mill’s against Hamilton, from one end of the volume 
 to the other, which is not completely and ridiculously without foun¬ 
 dation, even in those chapters which are regarded by Mr. Mill’s 
 friends as the most unexceptionable portions of the whole book ? 
 
 That Mr. Mill himself was aware of this fact—an equally impor¬ 
 tant section of what I have to establish,—must be separately dealt 
 with in each chapter. The only general indication that can be 
 here mentioned, of his being conscious of this unbroken series of 
 fictitious charges lies in the probability, whatever it is, that such a 
 series can be proved against him. If the latter is probable, so is 
 the former also. It is improbable, as I have said, in the extreme, 
 that Mr. Mill should have written a whole book of these so-called 
 ‘ blunders’ without knowing it. 
 
SECTION I. 
 
 ON CHAPTER XVII.—GENERAL CONCEPTIONS. 
 
 Mr. Mill’s propositions against Hamilton, under the head of 
 Logic, begin at Chapter xvii. The main point at issue in this 
 chapter is this :—When we think of things in the abstract, what do 
 we carry on our thoughts with ? Do we then think with words, 
 or with the meanings—the general concepts attached to words ? 
 Do we think by the aid of knowledge + words ? or do we think 
 by the aid of words alone ? Hamilton holds that we then think 
 with knowledge + words. Mr. Mill holds, or affects to hold, that 
 we do this with words only. The thing may be thus otherwise 
 stated :—Mr. Mill denies, it will be seen later, that we have a con¬ 
 ception of an individual chair, quite as positively as he does that 
 we have a general conception of the class of objects called chairs; 
 or that, when we think of that class of things, we think by means 
 of a general conception or knowledge of what we are thinking 
 about. Mr. Mill holds that we have nothing in either case to work 
 with but words + the objects themselves of which these words 
 are symbols. We have no conception, he tells us, either of the 
 individual object, or of its class,—no concept, as with precisely the 
 same signification (Ham., Lee. iii. 41-2) the word is also spelt,—no 
 concept of either of them. Although this is Mr. Mill’s view of the 
 matter, as we shall see abundantly hereafter, it is only incidentally 
 in this chapter that he extends his remarks to our concept of the 
 individual. He here professes to discuss the case of general concep¬ 
 tions (general concepts) only, or the concepts of genera. It is 
 therefore to his remarks on this point that we require chiefly to 
 confine ourselves. And Hamilton’s doctrine here is, that we have 
 thought-symbols to think with and word-symbols to speak with ; 
 the thought-symbols and the word-symbols being therefore sym- 
 
GENERAL CONCEPTIONS. 
 
 15 
 
 bols of one another. And of the thought-symbols (or concep¬ 
 tions) of things, Hamilton is very careful to explain that, when we 
 think of the individuals or concretes, this symbol is an image in 
 the mind, or a mental representation of the object; but that, in the 
 case of abstract things, the thought-symbol of the genus is not an 
 image in the mind, or an idea, but only that sort of general know- ' 
 ledge or general concept which can never constitute an image in 
 the mind. Mr. Mill, on the contrary, affects to hold that, when 
 we think of abstract things, we think with word-symbols only, for 
 which, when we employ them, we have no concept present to the 
 mind, and that we are able, nevertheless, to distinguish these word- 
 symbols (of objects) from one another without this concept or por¬ 
 tion of their import being attached to them. 
 
 Such is the strange doctrine which is expounded throughout 
 this chapter against Hamilton, and of which we find a brief expres¬ 
 sion in such clauses as these ‘ Is it correct to say, that we think 
 ‘ by means of concepts V (p. 330). ‘ To say, therefore, that we think 
 
 * by means of concepts, is only a circuitous and obscure way of say- 
 ‘ ing,’ etc. (331). ‘I consider it nothing less than a misfortune that 
 
 * the words (general) concept, general notion, or any other phrase to 
 
 ‘ express the supposed mental modification corresponding to a class- 
 ‘ name, should ever have been invented’ (ibid.) ‘ Leibnitz knew 
 ‘ better than to say that, even in these cases, we think by means of 
 ‘ the concept’ (336). ‘ On this point, therefore, a false apprehension 
 
 ‘ of the facts of thought is conveyed by the doctrine which speaks of 
 ‘ concepts as its instrument. Leibnitz would perhaps have said that 
 ‘ the name is the instrument in one of the two kinds of thinking, 
 
 ‘ and the concept in the other. The more reasonable doctrine surely 
 ‘ is, that the name is the instrument in both’ (ibid), etc., etc. How 
 how would it be possible (even a novice will ask) to use concept¬ 
 less or meaningless words as instruments of thought ? How is it 
 possible (it may be rather asked) that a second-rate or a third-rate 
 Logician, or even a person who is not a Logician at all, should be 
 able to come to such a wild conclusion respecting what we think 
 with ? 
 
 Mr. Mill’s defence for himself and his ‘ System of Logic’ upon 
 this point is, that we cannot think about class-qualities, except 
 by thinking of them as the qualities of something concrete. We 
 cannot, he tells us, think of swiftness without thinking of some 
 definite thing that is swift, nor of 4 and 5 making 9 without 
 
16 
 
 GENERAL CONCEPTIONS. 
 
 thinking of apples or bonbons. These abstract qualities, so abs¬ 
 tracted, cannot, we know, exist in rerum natura; but Mr. Mill 
 supposes that we cannot even think about them so abstracted,— 
 we cannot even think about them except when we think about 
 them as in the individual. The term ‘ horse/ in the abstract, 
 clearly denotes no individual. It therefore, says Mr. Mill, de¬ 
 notes, in that case, nothing at all. It has no concept. We have 
 no conception of what we mean by it. We use it without attach¬ 
 ing any concept to it, either individual or general! Again, he 
 argues that when we use the term ‘ horse’ in this way as a class- 
 word, we do not use it of anything that admits of our having an 
 image of it in the mind. This is quite true, but mark his infer¬ 
 ence. We therefore use it, in such cases, without attaching any 
 meaning to the word at all—without thinking about anything 
 signified. What makes Mr. Mill suppose that we cannot think of 
 that of which an image is impossible ? Mr. Mill has not the image 
 in his mind of Alexander’s war-horse. Yet can he not think about 
 it without this image ? He has not among his thoughts the image 
 of that concrete entity which we call the human spirit of Alexander 
 himself. Yet can he not think about it perfectly well without an 
 image—ay, and even whether he is able, or not able, to understand 
 that such a thing as the human spirit has a real existence ? 
 
 Mr. Mill seems to have been well aware that the rank nonsense 
 of this little piece of antagonism about thinking of things without 
 our having a concept of what we wished to think of, would have 
 been at once discerned if he allowed the least light to break in 
 upon it. He has, therefore, endeavoured to cloud it over with a 
 number of minor issues supposed to be connected with the ques¬ 
 tion ; and it is by the aid of the dense confusion thus made that 
 he seeks to persuade the audience that his giant is hit and floored 
 ad libitum throughout the chapter. I shall now indicate these 
 minor issues. 
 
 1. One of them is this, Mr. Mill tells us, that the Philosophical 
 world is, or was, divided into two factions—the one holding that 
 when we think of classes we think with general conceptions of 
 what we think about; the other holding that we then think without 
 any conceptions at all of what we think about. He seeks to fasten 
 the name of ‘ Conceptualists ’ upon the former of these factions, and 
 that of ‘ Nominalists ’ upon the latter. Now, all who have the most 
 elementary acquaintance with the history of Metaphysics are aware 
 
GENERAL CONCEPTIONS. 
 
 17 
 
 that there neither are, nor ever were, two such factions, schools, 
 * or parties in Philosophy, nor any such controversy ; and that the 
 two names, ‘Conceptualise and ‘Nominalist/ have no such meaning 
 attached to them by any one. In this sense of the term ‘ concep- 
 tualist/ there never was a Nominalist who was not a Conceptualist, 
 nor a Conceptualist who was not a Nominalist. Mr. Mill and his 
 System of Logic are here, as everywhere else, entirely at fault. 
 
 The Nominalists, it is well known, held, against the Eealists, 
 that the genus or class existed only as a general conception or no¬ 
 tion, and nominally,—not, as the Realists supposed, in rerum natura. 
 In this the Nominalists were always and everywhere unanimous. 
 Among the British Nominalists, however, and owing, it would appear, 
 to a defect in our language, there have been a few writers whose 
 Conceptualism, or knowledge of the genus, was by some critics 
 suspected of being something different from that of other Nominal¬ 
 ists. Locke was one of these few writers. His language, especially 
 his use of the word ‘ idea/ has created some uncertainty as to what 
 he held respecting the conception attached by him to the class- 
 name. Some of his critics have supposed him to have written as if 
 he held,—not that we could not think without having a conception 
 of what we thought about, for there never was a question upon 
 that point among mankind, not even in the time of Roscelinus,—but 
 that the conception of, or knowledge of, a genus or class was an 
 image (or idea) in the mind, any such abstract image (or idea) being 
 a thing utterly impossible. Of these critics of Locke, some, as 
 Berkeley, attribute his language to inadvertence and mistake, or 
 seem to do so. Others, as Hamilton, consider that Locke’s language 
 only seems to bear this construction,—that in reality it does not, and 
 that Locke himself never intended to speak of abstract images, but 
 only of the knowledge which we possess of what we are thinking 
 about. 
 
 The only objectionable sense that has ever been attributed to the 
 language of Locke, or of the few other British writers now adverted 
 to, is that here indicated, viz., that we have a mental image of a 
 genus; but no one has succeeded in making it very clear that their 
 language admitted of such a sense. Even Dugald Stewart, who 
 writes so much about them and their supposed views, calling them 
 ‘ Conceptualists ’ 'par excellence, admits over and over again that he 
 is not quite sure what they mean to express in the language they 
 use. ‘ It is not/ he says, ‘ a very easy matter to ascertain precisely 
 
 B 
 
18 
 
 GENERAL CONCEPTIONS. 
 
 ‘ what was their opinion on the point in question/ viz., as to 
 what was to be understood by forming a general conception —( Col¬ 
 lected Works , ii. p. 189, etc.); and he acknowledges that he could 
 only offer a conjecture on the subject. Surely this can hardly be 
 spoken of as a great Philosophical Party (which is what Mr. Mill 
 calls it), or to the smallest extent as a Party at all; for no 
 one ever yet defended the supposed hypothesis, that we have a 
 mental image of the genus; nor, as I have said, is it at all clear 
 that any one ever held such an hypothesis. Then, as to the iden¬ 
 tity of Conceptualists and Nominalists in all cases and all senses, 
 Brucker observes, even in a passage produced by Stewart himself, 
 that from a very remote period the name ‘ Conceptualist ’ began to 
 be used in all parts of Europe indiscriminately with ‘ Nominalist’ 
 (‘ Nominates Conceptuales dicti sunt.’— Ibid.) Of the Nominalists, 
 whom Stewart calls Conceptualists, in a special sense of that term, 
 Hamilton truly says, that it is all a mistake to suppose that they 
 differed in anything from the rest of the Conceptualists, and that 
 no such difference could ever have even been suspected where the 
 language of the country distinguished, as the German words, 
 begriff and anschauung, do distinguish, between the abstract notion 
 and the concrete notion—between the knowledge or concept which 
 consists of an image in the mind, and the knowledge or concept 
 which does not. But there never was a Conceptualist even in this, 
 the only obnoxious sense (of thinking with abstract images), who 
 was not also, and at the same time, a Nominalist. 
 
 Thus every one of Mr. Mill’s statements against Hamilton is here, 
 as everywhere in these pages, inconsistent with the fact. There is 
 no controversy whatever between the Nominalists and the Concep¬ 
 tualists. There never was. These were but two names for one and 
 the same party. The doctrine of the Nominalists is not to the 
 effect that there is no general knowledge of, no general conception 
 of, what we mean by a genus. Some of them, if we are to believe 
 their critics, have even gone so far as to hold that our general con¬ 
 ception of the genus is an image in the mind. Nor do they ever 
 say, as Mr. Mill does, that the class-word ‘horse’ suggests to the 
 mind either some one particular horse, or nothing at all. Nor does 
 Hamilton anywhere make such absurd statements on his own be¬ 
 half. To affirm (as Hamilton affirms) that the Conceptualist does 
 not ever really mean to say that we can have a general image in 
 the mind, is not to affirm that we can have it, or that we do have 
 
GENERAL CONCEPTIONS . 
 
 19 
 
 it, as Mr. Mill supposes Hamilton to affirm. To assert that the one 
 statement is the other, is only the ‘general mode of thought and habi¬ 
 tual phraseology’ of a giant-killer, not of a truth-seeker. In not 
 one single passage does Hamilton affirm—on not one single occasion 
 does he not strongly deny—that our concepts can ever he the abstract 
 or general image (or idea) attributed to those who were by Stewart 
 called ‘ Conceptualists.’ Hamilton’s propositions here are these 
 two,— first, that general names have general concepts; and secondly, 
 that no general concept can be an image in the mind. This is what 
 Mr. Mill thinks ought to puzzle us in Hamilton’s teaching; for it 
 puzzles him, he says. He does not see how we can think of any¬ 
 thing but images. But does it really puzzle him ? or would he 
 ever have chosen to pretend it did, were it not for the purpose of 
 carrying on this sham discussion ? 
 
 2. At p. 314 Mr. Mill makes a playful statement, with the in¬ 
 tention that, to the undiscerning reader, it should appear a very 
 grave one. He never loses an opportunity of illustrating his pet 
 theory of inseparable association, and accordingly here tells us, 
 apropos of abstract ideas, that the reason we cannot think of a human 
 being who is ‘ neither tall nor short (nor intermediate), neither fat 
 ‘ nor lean, neither black nor white (nor any other colour), neither 
 ‘ man nor woman, neither young nor old (nor intermediate), but all 
 ‘ and yet none of these at once,’ is because we have never yet found 
 such a human being in our experience (pp. 264-270); but that, 
 whenever we do find a few such, or perhaps a whole nation of them, 
 we shall recognise the fact now insisted upon by him, that there is no 
 a priori impracticability in the hypothesis of an abstract human being. 
 He even suggests that we may reasonably expect some fine day to 
 discover an abstract human being of this description, or a nation of 
 such, Expectation (p. 190) being native to men’s reason ! The ex¬ 
 istence of abstract ideas, as well as that of abstract objects, is 
 not impossible, but is only made difficult by Unvarying Associa¬ 
 tion ! Was there ever such nonsense written? (See pp. 317, etc., 
 and 338.) 
 
 3. Hamilton speaks of the concrete concept, or the concept of 
 the concrete, i.e., such as constitutes an image in the mind—such as 
 can be realized in thought—and of the universal, or abstract, or 
 general concept, i.e., such as does not constitute such an image— 
 such as cannot be realized in thought; and when he says that con¬ 
 cepts can be made universal by abstraction, or, as he justly ex- 
 
20 
 
 GENERAL CONCEPTIONS . 
 
 presses it, are potentially universal. Mr. Mill affects to think that 
 this must be said of concepts already universal (p. 317); that what 
 Hamilton says is, that concepts already universal can be rendered 
 universal! But how, Mr. Mill, can that which is universal be ren¬ 
 dered universal ? Can anything be more universal than universal ? 
 and, pray, what is the supposed point in the platitude, which here 
 follows, that although a concrete concept is not potentially universal, 
 you think it is universally potential ? Have you any clear meaning 
 attached to your phrase, 4 a potential concept V What sort of con¬ 
 cept is it ? But Mr. Mill well knows that there is not here even 
 the shabby joke that he pretends to. It is written only for those 
 who do not understand him. It is all Pantomime. 
 
 4. Hamilton says, and all philosophers admit, that the mind 
 figures to itself its images or ideas of things, and understands the 
 relations subsisting between these images. It does not figure to 
 itself the relations. It cannot do this. It merely thinks about 
 them, discerns them, or understands them. Of all this (a distinc¬ 
 tion which Hamilton nowhere ‘ negatives/ but everywhere insists 
 upon) Mr. Mill affects to dispute the accuracy (p. 318). He 
 affects not to see that ‘ to realize in thought’ and ‘ to represent in 
 imagination’ are both used by Hamilton of images in the mind, 
 i.e. y of ideas or concrete notions ; and that when Hamilton speaks 
 of understanding things, or exercising thought about them, he does 
 not necessarily speak of their being depicted to the imagination. 
 The one thing is said of relations, the other of the objects between 
 which these relations subsist. This puzzles Mr. Mill, he tells us, 
 very much. He does not see that to think about a thing does not 
 necessarily mean to have an image of it. But no one with the 
 slightest philosophical power will have any difficulty. Mr. John S. 
 Mill fearing this, and seeing himself thus driven by the giant into 
 a corner, calls in another giant to his aid. He ‘ apprehends’ 
 (p. 318) that Berkeley would not have recognised a different action 
 of the mind in the case of a relation and in the case of an object. 
 Berkeley would not, Mr. Mill ‘ apprehends,’ have only thought 
 about the one and had an image in his mind—an idea—of the 
 other. Is Mr. Mill so sure of that ? Does he not know what dis ¬ 
 tinction Berkeley draws between relations and objects in this 
 respect,—between having a notion (or knowledge) of a thing and 
 having an idea of it—an image of it in the mind ? Let him turn 
 to ‘The Principles of Human Knowledge,’ section 142, and let 
 
GENERAL CONCEPTIONS . 
 
 21 
 
 him there read, ‘It is also to be remarked that we cannot so 
 ‘ properly be said to have an idea, but rather a notion of the 
 ‘ relation or habitudes between things.’ Will Mr. Mill tell us if 
 this is not saying distinctly that we image one kind of subject and 
 think about another ? ‘ Why do I talk of Berkeley ?’ asks Mr. 
 
 Mill. Why, indeed ? But Mr. Mill well knows that his motive 
 in talking of Berkeley was to employ a little argumentum ad 
 ignorantiam, where he had reason to hope that such an argument 
 would be effective. So the Giants, that are expected to fight, shake 
 hands. 
 
 5. Finding himself foiled at this point, and that there really is 
 this distinction made and to be made between ‘thinking about’ a 
 relation and ‘ imagining’ the objects between which the relation 
 exists,—that a relation cannot have a mental representation, though 
 an object can, and that Hamilton nowhere ‘negatives’ this distinc¬ 
 tion, Mr. Mill turns to a fresh point, admitting this one, but 
 slurring over the fact of his admission. He admits that relations 
 can only be thought of, not imagined; but asks (p. 319), with 
 marvellous naiveU, How is the universal concept a relation ? He 
 suddenly remembers, however, that Hamilton had taught him this 
 in the quotation at p. 310, and muttering something about qualities 
 not being general notions, but only the occasion of general notions, 
 he, in his own ungraceful manner, admits himself at fault here 
 also,—‘ Ah, yes; well, it will not hurt me to abandon this 
 ‘ objection. However inappropriate the truth here is, however 
 ‘ inappropriate it is just now to speak of a universal notion as a 
 ‘ relation of resemblance, I admit it is one.’ Such is the substance 
 of Mr. Mill’s words in the passage criticised. 
 
 6. The next expedient of which he bethinks him, in order to 
 make it appear that Hamilton’s general notion is an image, is to 
 avail himself of the confusion connected with the not very English 
 expression, ‘ to think a chair,’ ‘ to think an inkstand,’ etc., instead 
 of to imagine a chair, to figure to one’s-self an inkstand. This 
 language is common enough now-a-days even in good writers, 
 and Mr. Mill has appropriated it, using it much too often for him 
 to plead ignorance of its import. But there is also the ordinary 
 expression of very different import, ‘ to think about or of a chair,’ 
 
 ‘ to think about or of an inkstand.’ We thus have two totally 
 different meanings attached to the same word differently used, viz., 
 to think a thing, and to think of or about a thing; and when 
 
22 
 
 GENERAL CONCEPTIONS. 
 
 Hamilton uses the latter about relations, Mr. Mill affects to regard 
 this as of the same import as the former, and to conclude that 
 when Hamilton says we think of a relation, he means we have an 
 image of one in the mind. I grant (he says) that an abstract con¬ 
 cept and a concrete concept are, as Berkeley teaches, two totally 
 distinct and different things,—the one an image or idea, the other 
 a mere notion and no image. I grant, also, that the abstract con¬ 
 cept is a relation, and cannot, therefore, be an image. But what 
 I assert is, that Sir W. Hamilton contradicts himself, and negatives 
 this distinction, when he says that the relation, though it cannot 
 be imagined, can be thought; though it cannot be imagined , can be 
 imagined! Mr. Mill knows very well that Hamilton makes no 
 such statement; and, accordingly, seeks to thicken the confusion 
 here by arguing that as a general notion is a relation, and a 
 relation requires images of the related objects, it follows that the 
 relation itself must be an image! Is this indeed true ? Is the 
 relation between two colours a colour ? or between two sounds a 
 sound? Is Mr. Mill so poor a Logician as not to see his own 
 equivocation both in this remark and in the one preceding it? 
 Ho. Hamilton does not contradict himself. He says nothing that 
 identifies a relation and an image. 
 
 7. Mr. Mill represents Hamilton (pp. 337, 338, and elsewhere) 
 as constantly vacillating between the two meanings of the term 
 * concept/ its abstract meaning and its concrete, whereas Hamilton 
 never vacillated on the subject. He said that the word had two 
 meanings, viz., only the qualities in which objects resemble one 
 -another, and these superadded to all the qualities by which they 
 ^•are distinguished from one another, and Hamilton used it in both, 
 but without the slightest vagueness as to which meaning he in each 
 case intended, saying, nevertheless, that the term ought, properly 
 speaking, to have been limited to a single meaning. In all which 
 Mr. Mill follows him. There is not the slightest vacillation or in¬ 
 consistency in the matter. 
 
 Another giant is then put forward to engage Hamilton, although 
 he does not seem in the least to do so. Mr. Mansel speaks of the 
 mental image of a thing as the concept of the thing quite as dis¬ 
 tinctly as Hamilton does, and even a little more so. Mr. Mill then 
 seeks to disparage Mr. Mansel’s acquiescence in Hamilton’s views, 
 by saying that when we speak of a thing we do not speak of it as 
 it is known, but as it is in itself. This is a monstrous mistake of 
 
GENERAL CONCEPTIONS. 
 
 23 
 
 Mr. Mill’s. We are obliged to be satisfied to speak of it and think 
 of it as it is known. We have nothing else to deal with or speak 
 of but it, as it is known. We know nothing of it as it is not 
 known. If we speak of it otherwise than as it is known, we shall 
 get into pretty difficulties. 
 
 Mr. Mill further seeks to effect this disparagement of Mr. Mansel’s 
 views, by pretending that ‘ the concept of a thing’ means each per¬ 
 son’s own concept or knowledge of it. Now, it never means this. 
 The concept of a thing denotes that knowledge of facts and quali¬ 
 ties which all the best informed persons have ascertained as our 
 correct knowledge of it, not (as Mr. Mill mistakenly supposes) what 
 tfiis or that ignorant person may fancy the thing to be. 
 
 Mr. Mill also says that, according to Hamilton and Mansel, if 
 Caesar reappeared on earth, this would be that all men’s concept of 
 Caesar (including, of course, the length of time since his demise) 
 corresponded minutely with that which we had of the living man 
 before us ; and Mr. Mill seems to think this fact fatal to our hav¬ 
 ing concrete concepts, as Mansel agrees with Hamilton that we 
 have. But what can Mr. Mill here mean ? If Caesar reappeared 
 upon the earth to-morrow, would our concept of him then not be 
 identical with that of yesterday ? would the two concepts then not 
 be of identically the same object? Or, if they were identical, 
 would it not be true that Caesar would have reappeared upon the 
 earth? Surely Mr. Mill did not here mean the quibble that 
 emerges in his words. Or again, if there were a dozen Julius 
 Caesars, our concepts of whom were identical, i.e., of each of whom 
 we knew exactly and minutely all the same things, without even 
 variation in time or place, should we have more than one Caesar to 
 think of, and one concept to deal with ? and if these twelve con¬ 
 cepts, otherwise identical, varied in time and place, should we not 
 naturally and necessarily think of each Julius as a separate Julius, 
 instead of as the only Julius ? Where is the supposed absurdity in 
 all this except in the fact of its being introduced here by Mr. Mill 
 as a reason for supposing that we cannot have a concept of the in 
 dividual? But the drollest part of this droll page (339) is where 
 our frolicsome critic, forgetting all his recent animadversion and 
 depreciation, tells us that the giant he was fighting with is 
 stronger than the one he brought in to oppose him,—that it will not 
 do to kick against the pricks any longer, and that the true doctrine 
 here, after all, is that of Sir William Hamilton, not that of Mr. 
 
24 
 
 GENERAL CONCEPTIONS. 
 
 Mansel, although both hold precisely the same doctrine, viz., that 
 we have concepts of individuals as well as generic concepts, and 
 that these concrete concepts are images or presentations in the 
 mind. 
 
 8. Finally, another Giant is ushered in. Sir William and Mr. 
 Mansel (we are told) are not nearly so clear or correct on the sub¬ 
 ject of concepts, the concepts of the Nominalists, as Dr. Reid ! I 
 need not reply to such a comment. The fact is, that not only the 
 statements of all three upon these concepts—both the individual 
 ones and the generic ones—are, as every one knows, precisely iden¬ 
 tical ; but that nothing can exceed Reid’s explicitness as to the fact 
 that all Nominalists were Conceptualists, describing as he does the 
 question between them and the Realists as being ‘ Whether genera 
 ‘ and species do really exist in nature, or whether they are only con- 
 1 ceptions of the human mind.’ (Ham. edit., p. 406.) But Mr. Mill’s 
 remark here, and all his remarks respecting concepts, would, from 
 their captiousness and irrelevance, lead one to suppose him to be 
 extremely dissatisfied with himself and his ‘ System of Logic’ upon 
 this point, to be engaged now for the first time in the thorough 
 study of the question, and to be unable, as yet, to understand the 
 great men who had already mastered and expounded it, all which 
 he endeavours to conceal under this irrelevance and this cap¬ 
 tiousness. 
 
 I must not omit to state, that, as usual in all review-articles, 
 where we buy, with a little praise, some credit for all our censure, 
 or, with a little censure, some credit for all our praise, there are, 
 after page 321, some ten pages in praise of Hamilton, and indeed 
 even of Mr. Mansel, with powerful and beautiful passages quoted 
 from their works on Logic, which leave all Mr. Mill’s own writing 
 on that subject far behind. This praise, however, is expressed with 
 a patronizing air, which makes us smile when we consider the 
 patron and the patronized, and when we reflect upon the poor self- 
 praise in which it is intended to result. But all this is harmless; 
 and as to the note placed at the end of the chapter to introduce its 
 little jeu de mots , about not having a clear conception of what makes 
 a conception clear, that also is very harmless. It can mislead no 
 one, and requires no comment. 
 
 I have now examined each of Mr. Mill’s propositions in this 
 17th chapter, both the leading one (that we do not think with 
 concepts), and the minor ones, eight in number, and we see how 
 
GENERAL CONCEPTIONS. 
 
 25 
 
 completely and evidently fictions of the imagination they all are. 
 We see also that it is impossible, in the case of one so good-natnred 
 and intelligent as Mr. Mill, to account for such misstatements either 
 by extreme ignorance and thickheadness, as so many have done, or 
 by vindictiveness and malice, as others seek to do, or by any other 
 hypothesis than by supposing a practical joke aimed at, and the 
 stage-effect which these statements afford, of confusion, haze, and 
 mystification, under cover of which we are entertained with a 
 grand melee of the Giants—Berkeley, Mansel, Whately, Leibnitz, 
 Hamilton, Locke, Kant, and Beid,—all in turn overpowering, we 
 are told, and overpowered, while the Giant-killer in the midst 
 is enabled to appear, to his admiring audience, as striking heavy 
 blows all the time with the sledge-hammer at his great adversary ; 
 ay, on many occasions, as felling him to the ground. On the 
 dispersion of the haze, however, at the close, we behold, to our sur¬ 
 prise, the intellectual Giant of Scotland erect and magnificent and 
 calm, as before, among his peers, not having been even touched by 
 his little foe. It is Jack, on the contrary, as usual, who from his 
 exertions in pirouette and somersault, is found upon all-fours at the 
 end of the chapter, picking himself up with the awkward gestures of 
 one who has come off second best in some affray, real or imaginary. 
 
 It only remains to show, by a few brief quotations, that Mr. 
 Mill, although intent upon a joke, was not intent upon being- 
 thought a blockhead; and that, consequently, with regard to the 
 leading proposition, about our thinking with concepts (to which it 
 was hoped that an air of probability and profundity would have been 
 given by all the minor cavils of the chapter), he has, as usual, un¬ 
 equivocally withdrawn all he said. 
 
 He acknowledges as follows :— 
 
 1. That he was wellnware he was wrong in condemning Hamil¬ 
 ton for holding that we think with concepts. ‘ With the exception 
 ‘ of a few minor matters, I find no fault in his theory’ (p. 329). 
 
 ‘ No one more fully than Sir W. Hamilton recognises the true 
 ‘theory’ (p. 331). 
 
 2. That, when Hamilton says that we think with concepts, as 
 well as words, he really says nothing contrary to what Mr. Mill 
 himself intends to convey, when Mr. Mill says that we do not. 
 
 ‘ To say that we think by means of concepts, is only a way of say- 
 ‘ ing that we think by means of general or class-names. ... It is 
 ‘ possible so to define the terms that both expressions shall mean 
 
26 
 
 GENERAL CONCEPTIONS. 
 
 ‘ the same thing’ (p. 331). * The doctrines which they (those who 
 
 ‘ hold that we think with concepts as well as words), have laid 
 ‘ down respecting Conception, Judgment, and Reasoning (the mental 
 ‘ results) have been capable of being rendered into equivalent state- 
 ‘ ments respecting Terms, Propositions, and Arguments’—the verbal 
 results—(p. 341). 
 
 3. That all writers upon these subjects (i.e., all except Mr. Mill 
 himself, or, as he prefers to express it, a great majority) are agreed 
 with Hamilton that we think by means of concepts as well as 
 words—are, in fact,like Hamilton, Nominalists instead pf Verbalists.^.'' 
 ‘ To read the account which he and Mr. Mansel, in common with 
 ‘ the great majority of modern Logicians, give of our intellectual 
 ‘ processes,—which they always make to consist essentially of some 
 ‘ operation practised upon concepts,—no one would ever imagine 
 ‘ that concepts were not distinct possessions of the mind, habi- 
 ‘ tually dealt with by it quite apart from anything else ’—apart 
 from the object, for instance, of which it is the concept, or, if it is a 
 general concept, apart from the mental image to which it belongs 
 —(p. 331). 
 
 I have now shown that Mr. Mill withdraws everything which he 
 affects to allege in this chapter against the general doctrine of all 
 enlightened men, that we think with concepts. He admits that it 
 is the doctrine of all enlightened men, if we except himself. He 
 then admits that it does not differ, except in the minor matter of 
 expression, from his own theory, the opposing parties here being, 
 as Hamilton had taught him (p. 310), really at one. He admits, in 
 short, that he holds Hamilton’s and Mansel’s theory on this point 
 as much as they hold it themselves, and that this theory, as held 
 by them, is perfectly true. 
 
 It may appear sufficient to have said thus much upon Mr. 
 Mill’s so-called ‘ Examination’ of thinking with concepts instead of, 
 as Mr. Mill had been supposing possible, thinking with words. 
 Two important points, however, remain to be adverted to, as 
 throwing light, Mr. Mill would say, on the character of the whole 
 volume. 
 
 1. Mr. Mill says that although he sees that there is nothing 
 really inaccurate in saying that we think with concepts, and that 
 Hamilton was quite right in saying that ‘ the opposing parties are 
 ‘ at one,’ there nevertheless seems to him to be something more 
 circumlocutory, and therefore less clear as well as more misleading, 
 
GENERAL CONCEPTIONS. 
 
 27 
 
 in saying that we think with meanings to our words than in say¬ 
 ing that we do not,—in saying that we think with concepts than 
 in saying that we think with words. He writes thus :—‘ To say, 
 ‘ therefore, that we think by means of concepts, is only a circuitous 
 ■ and obscure way of saying that we think by means of general or 
 ‘ class-names’ (p. 331). ‘I consider it nothing less than a misfor- 
 ‘ tune that the words “ concept,” “ General Notion,” or any other 
 ‘ phrase to express the supposed mental modification correspond- 
 ‘ ing to a class-name should ever have been invented’ (p. 331). 
 ‘ The proposition, that we think by concepts, is ... an unprecise and 
 ‘ misleading expression of the truth’ (p. 341). Here, then, if any 
 doubt remains on the reader’s mind as to the object of this chapter, 
 he has to determine with himself, for Mr. Mill does not tell him, in 
 what respect it is more circumlocutory, obscure, or misleading to a 
 novice to say that we think with meanings or concepts, than it is 
 to say that we think without them. 
 
 2. Since, however, Hamilton is, according to Mr. Mill’s admis¬ 
 sion, right in saying that it is with the meanings of words plus the 
 words—not with the words alone—that we think, and that there 
 really never was any room for controversy as to this point, Mr. 
 Mill next suggests, apparently for no other purpose than in order 
 to seem still to have something to say against Hamilton, that we 
 should not call the meanings of words 4 concepts,’ but that we 
 should call them ‘ significations’ rather, or, still better, that we 
 should employ his own little pet term ‘connotations,’ expressly 
 invented by himself for this very purpose, and call them the ‘ con¬ 
 notations’ of words ; adding, by way of encouragement, that, as in 
 Locke’s case so in Hamilton’s, this trifling alteration of a word 
 would bring the writer up to Mr. Mill’s own level, which Mr. Mill 
 naturally regards as the highest scientific level of the age. He 
 writes thus :—‘ I hold that nothing but confusion ever results from 
 ‘ introducing the term “ concept” into Logic, and that, instead of 
 ‘ the concept of a class, we should always speak of the “ significa- 
 ‘ tion” of a class-name’ (p. 332). ‘ Little amiss except a mode of 
 
 ‘ expression’ (p. 341). Alluding to Locke’s having also held that 
 we think with meanings to our words, which meanings, however, 
 Locke by an oversight called ‘ Abstract Ideas’ instead of general 
 notions or general concepts, Mr. Mill observes :—‘ His admirable 
 ‘ Third Book requires hardly any other alteration to bring it up to 
 ‘ the scientific level of the present time, than to be corrected by 
 
28 
 
 GENERAL CONCEPTIONS. 
 
 ‘ blotting out everywhere the words “ Abstract Idea,” and replacing 
 ' them by the “ connotation’ 1 of the class-name’ (p. 341). 
 
 These, then, are the two expressions—‘significations’ and ‘ con¬ 
 notations’—which are proposed to us as obviating the circuitous, 
 obscure, and misleading character of the term ‘ concept!’ Also as 
 elevating us to the highest scientific level of the age! To think, 
 then, by means of the significations of class-names, and, out of com¬ 
 pliment to Mr. Mill, to think by means of these so-called ‘ con¬ 
 notations’ of class names, are phrases rather less circuitous than to 
 think with the concepts of class- names ; also less obscure and less 
 misleading to those who do not understand the subject, nay—and let 
 us not forget that—connected likewise with our scientific elevation ! 
 Will Mr. Mill be good enough, out of compliment to common sense, 
 to point out in what respect he wishes us to believe that Hamilton’s 
 expression involves more circumlocution, more obscurity, or more 
 misguidance than either of the phrases he proposes ? Of course I 
 am aware that he does not suppose his expressions to be better than 
 the common one, which is also Hamilton’s. I only ask in what 
 respect he wishes the uninitiated multitude, for whom alone he 
 writes, to believe that they are better. 
 
 Nor does he stop here. Other substitutes suggest themselves 
 to him in the course of the chapter. At p. 330, for instance, where 
 he is loudest in his denunciations of the circuitous, obscure, and 
 misleading term ‘ concept,’ he, with admirable gravity, proposes one 
 of these substitutes—thus, ‘ Is it correct to say that we think by 
 ‘ means of concepts ? Would it not convey a clearer meaning to 
 ‘ say that we think by means of ideas of concrete phenomena, such as 
 * are presented in experience or represented in imagination, and by 
 ‘ means of names which, being in a peculiar manner associated with 
 ‘ certain elements of the concrete images, arrest our attention on these 
 ‘ elements V (p. 330). This less misleading to the uninitiated ! This 
 rather more clear also for them, and less circuitous for all of us, than 
 the common phrase * to think by means of concepts.’ Surely this 
 must be what he means by a mode of expression attempting to be 
 more philosophical than it knew how to be. But what on earth 
 could Mr. Mill have hoped for from writing such rodomontade as 
 this even for the unlearned of our enlightened times? Has he 
 formed so very low an estimate of the understandings of the un¬ 
 learned,—of those admirers for whose entertainment he has under¬ 
 taken in these pages to overthrow a Giant ? 
 
GENERAL CONCEPTIONS . 
 
 29 
 
 We see then that, even upon Mr. Mill’s own elaborate showing, it 
 is not wrong to hold, nor either circuitous or obscure or misleading to 
 say, that (as Hamilton taught, and as we all are conscious) we think 
 by means of concepts as well as words. We see also that this whole 
 chapter of thirty pages, with all its playful swaggering animadver¬ 
 sion, is a mere sham, not really intended by its author to have a 
 place in the serious literature of his country. 
 
 Those who here find themselves in the not very comfortable 
 position of having been, by their applause of Mr. Mill, or by their 
 grave censure, unconsciously supporting a Pantomime, will be very 
 likely to complain that I make no allowance for a mistake, that 
 Mr. Mill may have made a mistake as well as another man, and 
 that I ought to have pointed that out, instead of ascribing the con¬ 
 sequences of it to the tricks of the circus. 
 
 My reply is this, If every chapter in Mr. Mill’s book were not, 
 like this, each with its own full complement of circus tricks in it, 
 I should myself have thought it sufficient to have proceeded in the 
 usual way. But, as the book now stands, it would only be playing 
 into Mr. Mill’s cards—only joining his circus—that I should do 
 so. In an ordinary case I should have dealt with this chapter as 
 follows : I should have said, This writer makes a mistake. He 
 writes thirty pages to show that we do not think with concepts + 
 words, as all are agreed we do, but with words only; and what de¬ 
 ceives him is that he never in his statements uses the alternative 
 ‘but with words only.’ He always says ‘but with names only;’ 
 forgetting that a name is a concept + a word, or a word + a 
 concept, and not by any means a word without a concept. 
 Thus, when he very justly saw that we think with names only, he 
 supposed this to mean that we think with words only ; whereas it 
 means precisely the same thing as our ordinary expression,—to 
 think with concepts as well as words. This sort of criticism would 
 be just and reasonable enough in an ordinary case, and would 
 account for everything; but I have too good an opinion of Mr. 
 Mill’s discernment to suppose it possible that such a criticism 
 could apply to him. He knows very well that the term ‘ name’ 
 means a concept as well as a word, although he uses it to serve his 
 purpose of confusion throughout this chapter as synonymous with 
 ‘ word.’ Or I might have, with great plausibility, described Mr. 
 Mill as deceived by the fact, that abstract qualities cannot be 
 thought of as existing; and holding that they, therefore, cannot 
 
30 
 
 GENERAL CONCEPTIONS. 
 
 be thought of at all,—cannot even be thought of as not existing. 
 This also would have accounted abundantly for all the 'blunders’ 
 of this chapter; and it is possible that the entanglement here sup- 
 posable may have encouraged the author to enter upon the rest of 
 the mystifications in these thirty pages. But is it credible that Mr. 
 Mill was himself mystified—himself entangled ? Out upon such 
 rubbish ! Besides, as I have asked before, are we to suppose that 
 Mr. Mill has written a whole book, consisting entirely of these 
 mistakes from beginning to end ? Yet this is what those must hold 
 who seek thus to interpret his 560 pages. No, no ; Mr. Mill knows 
 well what he is doing. He makes no mistake; at least, none of 
 that very clumsy order. He has a reason just now for seeming to 
 have a successful struggle with a Giant, which seeming can, of 
 course, be only managed by contrivances. These contrivances, 
 therefore, are what he aims at. Mr. Mill makes no mistake. 
 
SECTION II. 
 
 ON CHAPTER XVIII.—JUDGMENT. 
 
 We see, then, that it is a perfectly true theory, and perfectly cor¬ 
 rect to say, that we think by means of concepts, and that even Mr. 
 Mill admits this as fully as any one can admit anything. He ad¬ 
 mits that all that there is amiss in this proposition—the only dif¬ 
 ference that there is between it and his own—is that it contains 
 the term ‘ concepts’ where his own has ‘ significations’ (p. 332); 
 and this Mr. Mill admits to be a mere verbal difference, of no other 
 consequence, he thinks, than that it might mislead an ignorant 
 person into the belief that we could form a mental representation 
 —a mental image—of a genus, Mr. Mill having apparently some¬ 
 times had some impression that the term ‘ concept,’ in Hamilton’s 
 use of it, expresses only a mental image such as we have of a 
 single object, whereas it applies equally in his writings to the 
 general notion that we have of many objects. I say ‘ sometimes,’ 
 because, as we have seen already, Mr. Mill, when it suits his pur¬ 
 pose of confusion, takes up the opposite impression, that Hamilton 
 never uses it to denote the mental image of a single object. 
 
 In the first page of this chapter, Mr. Mill not only recapitulates 
 this abandonment of his first point respecting what we think with, 
 but voluntarily superadds the further admission that Hamilton’s 
 view of Logic (which is, as we have seen, that of all Logicians) 
 must stand or fall with the proposition that we think with con¬ 
 cepts,—that, as Mr. Mill expresses it, it is ‘ wholly grounded on 
 ‘ that proposition’ (p. 341). 
 
 Now, it is not a little startling to find that, notwithstanding 
 the two admissions thus made—the one extorted, and the other 
 volunteered,—Mr. Mill nevertheless glides back at once again to 
 the protection of the bugbear which he has constructed out of 
 
32 
 
 JUDGMENT. 
 
 something that he calls ‘ conceptualism/ to frighten the giants 
 with, and proceeds, in the same first page of the chapter, to con¬ 
 trovert Hamilton’s doctrine of Logic, in the case of Judgment 
 first, and then in that of Eeasoning, expressly because , as he there 
 informs us, Hamilton has so founded this doctrine that it must 
 stand or fall with the principle that we think with concepts, and 
 expressly because there is only a verbal difference between this prin¬ 
 ciple and his own. ‘We shall accordingly proceed/ he says, ‘to 
 ‘ examine ’ (read, to find all sorts of fault with) ‘ the explanation of 
 ‘ Judgment and of Eeasoning which Sir W. Hamilton has built on 
 ‘ the foundation of the doctrine of concepts.’ But we must not 
 wonder. There is as much consistency in this act of Mr. Mill’s 
 as we need ever expect to find in the hero of our little Epic. 
 
 I shall, however, take the liberty here of keeping him to his ad¬ 
 mission, that, in this matter of using the expression ‘ concepts of 
 ‘ words/ instead of ‘ significations of words/ there is nothing amiss 
 except a mode of expression which he thinks apt to mislead the 
 ignorant, and that, as far as that is concerned, therefore, Hamilton’s 
 view of Logic being wholly grounded upon it, and upon nothing 
 else, rests, by Mr. Mill’s own account, upon a solid foundation. 
 Let us now next attend to what he finds amiss,—apart from the 
 ‘ conceptualist ’ bugbear, and a mere mode of expression,—in 
 Hamilton’s account of Judgment, and what he writes the twenty- 
 four pages about, of which this chapter consists. 
 
 Main Issue. 
 
 It will be seen that what he here objects to—let us say, affects 
 to object to—in Hamilton, is Hamilton’s saying that, of the two 
 concepts compared in each judgment, ‘ the one concept is actually 
 a part of the other’ (p. 345). If Hamilton had only said ‘ co¬ 
 existed with the other/ our worthy critic could have stood that; 
 but when Hamilton speaks of a logical whole, when he speaks of 
 the relation of whole and part between these two concepts, as all 
 other Logicians do, from Aristotle downwards,—when he says that 
 one concept is, not along with the other, but a part of the other, 
 —then indeed the Giant-killer can stand the thing no longer, then 
 indeed Hamilton is outrageously—multitudinously—wrong, and 
 the Giant must be ‘ brought down.’ Let us look a little into this. 
 
 Most people who know anything at all of Logic, know that there 
 
JUDGMENT. 
 
 33 
 
 are two Logical wholes,—the Individual and the Class,—the con¬ 
 crete totality or Individual, and the generic (abstract) totality or 
 Class. The Individual is a whole, inasmuch as it contains in it, as 
 parts of it, the qualities constituting the class to which it belongs ; 
 and the Class is a whole, of which all those individuals that, are 
 classed under it are regarded as the parts. The first is, strictly 
 speaking, called a Metaphysical, the second a Logical whole; but it 
 is equally true that they are both Logical wholes. Thus, when we 
 say the boat is swift, the swiftness is here a quality distinguishing 
 the class which we may call ‘ swift things/ It is, we are informed 
 by the proposition, part of the boat spoken of—part of a swift boat, 
 therefore, and this, not as a piece of the timber is part of it, but, in 
 a logical sense, as an attribute—as its shape or size is part of it; 
 and we can have no difficulty in seeing that the swift boat is conse¬ 
 quently in the relation of whole to the swiftness, its part, as well as 
 also to the boat minus its swiftness. Likewise the swift boat is one 
 of the objects that go to make up the class, swift things, i.e., is part 
 of that class. The class is here, therefore, in its turn placed in the 
 relation of whole to the swift boat, its part. It ought further to be 
 remembered, that the Predicate is sometimes called the whole in 
 Extension, and the Subject the whole in Comprehension ; also, 
 that all the qualities or parts which go to constitute the Subject- 
 Whole are said to determine it—to fix more fully what it is; 
 and to be contained in their whole, not under it; whereas, in the 
 corresponding expression, the individuals or parts of the Predicate - 
 Whole are said to be contained under their class or whole, not 
 in it. 
 
 When we say, moreover, that the whole has its part in it,—that 
 the swift boat, for instance, of which we speak, is swift,—this is 
 called in Logic an Identical proposition; and it is so to the speaker, 
 inasmuch as it is only saying that a thing which we know to exist 
 does exist, or, in other words, that a thing which is, is. It is only to 
 persons unacquainted with the facts that this is not, or rather may 
 seem not to be, an identical proposition. But, strictly speaking, it 
 is so even to them. For they know that what is said is, or pre¬ 
 tends to be, of a swift boat, and they know that what is said of it 
 is that it is swift. This is what in Logic is meant by an Identical % 
 proposition; and a little reflection will show the general reader that 
 all our propositions or assertions are of this nature. They all 
 state that one part of the whole thing spoken of is one part of 
 
34 
 
 JUDGMENT. 
 
 it. They are all Identical; and all writers are agreed that 
 they are. 
 
 Also, when we discern that the whole has this or that part in it, 
 —that the swift boat, for instance, of which we think, is swift, — 
 has swiftness in it, or has a good shape, etc., this is judgment, 
 and can only result from knowledge real or supposed. It consists 
 in discerning the attributes or parts of the whole—as of the swift 
 well-shaped boat,-^and in separating these attributes or parts in 
 our own mind from the rest, in order to let them be brought to¬ 
 gether as for the first time in the mind of the person unacquainted 
 with them, when he hears them from us. The judgment that thus 
 separates— i.e., the judgment of the person who knows the facts—is 
 called in Logic an Analytic Judgment , from the Greek word signi¬ 
 fying to separate into parts ; and the belief or apprehension here¬ 
 upon formed by the person previously ignorant, who now puts 
 together in his mind the separated parts, is called by some a Judg¬ 
 ment also,—a Synthetic Judgment, from the Greek word signifying 
 to combine ; but it is clear that this mental operation, or its result, 
 can only be called a judgment in a very lax sense. All judgments, 
 therefore, respecting what we already know, or are supposed to know, 
 are Analytic Judgments, whether we choose to call them synthetic 
 results, or not, with respect to those who are thereby only learning, 
 and do not previously know the fact we state. Thus, the boat is 
 swift, is an Analytic Judgment, with reference to all who know the 
 fact; and a synthetic judgment, only with reference to him who now 
 hears it for the first time; and thus also it is clear that every pro¬ 
 position represents and expresses an analytic judgment, whether 
 there be any mind to which this proposition suggests also what by 
 Mr. Mill is called a synthetic judgment, or not. 
 
 It will greatly assist the general reader to see the mass of utter 
 nonsense brought together by the dexterous champion of the 
 Eationalists into this chapter, if he bears carefully in mind these 
 technical terms, and the distinctions they are intended to convey. 
 It is behind these, for the most part, that the supposed battle is 
 fought. 
 
 Now, what Hamilton and all Logicians, great and small, from 
 Aristotle to this hour, say is, that there can be no affirmative judg¬ 
 ment except where one congruent notion or concept can be the 
 quality of another. Size, for instance, and virtue, are compatible 
 or congruent notions—they can belong to one and the same third 
 
JUDGMENT. 
 
 35 
 
 object,—but we cannot say that virtue is qualified by size, nor size 
 by virtue. We can, therefore, see no point for comparison or judg¬ 
 ment between physical extent and virtue. All Logicians have also 
 said that every quality is, logically speaking, a part of the thing in 
 which it resides,—a part of the whole made up of that quality, and 
 of whatever the thing would be without that quality, the thing 
 without this quality being the other part. A swift boat is regarded 
 as a whole, consisting of the set of abstract qualities which we call 
 a boat with the quality swiftness superadded to them. Hamilton 
 calls this quality part of the whole group thus formed. He does 
 not, nor do any of us, call it one of the abstract qualities understood 
 by the term ‘ boat/ nor does he call it part of those qualities. He 
 calls it part of a swift boat,—one of the qualities of the group in 
 which it exists. And what is there that we can call the part of 
 anything, if this is not a part ? 
 
 What Mr. Mill insists upon throughout this chapter in opposi¬ 
 tion to the Logical world, and to Hamilton as its representative, is 
 that all this is false ; that a quality is not a part of the group of 
 qualities of which it is one, but only coexists with the group,—is 
 only placed along with its own group ; that when we have a qualified 
 object, this qualified object cannot be regarded as a whole of which 
 each quality is a part; that a swift boat is not a whole consisting 
 of the abstract quality swiftness, plus that set of other abstract 
 qualities which we designate a boat. He will have it that, in all 
 such cases, each quality can only be said to coexist with, or, as he 
 expresses it, ‘ along with/ the whole group. He describes (p. 345) 
 the entire difference between himself and Hamilton as being ‘ the 
 /whole interval which separates a part of from along with / and 
 says that the quality denoted by swiftness on the one hand, and 
 the group of qualities which we call a swift boat on the other 
 hand, can not only coexist with one another, but ‘ can be simul¬ 
 taneously possessed by the same object’ (ibid.), — i.e., by some ter- 
 tium guid. This reads like a mauvaise plaisanterie intended to 
 obstruct the argument. Does he mean by the owner of the boat ? 
 If not, pray, Mr. Mill, what is the tertium quid in this case ? But 
 Mr. Mill well knows that there is none. 
 
 The point here at issue is very clear, and in a nutshell. Is the 
 swiftness of the s$d,ft boat part of the swift boat, or is it not ? Is 
 the notion or concept of this swiftness part of the notion of a gwift 
 boat, or is it not ? Is it only superadded to that of a shrift boat ? 
 
36 
 
 JUDGMENT . 
 
 But why superadd,—or rather, how can we superadd what is 
 already there ? The question is not whether swiftness is part of a 
 group of qualities in which it does not exist,—whether it is part, for 
 instance, of a boat which is not swift. The question simply is, 
 whether it is part of a swift boat—part of the qualities of which a 
 swift boat consists ? and can anything, I ask, exceed the childish¬ 
 ness of saying that it is not?—or the unreasonableness of those 
 critics who represent Mr. Mill as making this assertion otherwise 
 than in jest, and in order to carry out this little imitation or pan¬ 
 tomime of the real and celebrated Jack the Giant-killer of 
 antiquity ? 
 
 What Mr. Mill and all of us are agreed about is, that when we 
 think of, or judge of, anything, we do so from our knowledge of that 
 thing , or what we believe to be our knowledge of it. We do not 
 think of, or judge of, a thing from our ignorance respecting it, or 
 from what we suppose to be our ignorance respecting it. Mr. Mill no¬ 
 where seriously denies this—nowhere, perhaps, professes to deny it 
 at all; nor could he, we see, make a single statement if he did ; for 
 \ if he does not know what he states, or believe he knows, or at least 
 pretend he knows, how can he state it ? This reflection makes it 
 easy for us to see, what every one, even Mr. Mill, is agreed about, 
 that all our judgments are Analytic judgments, whether, in the 
 minds of others, they be attended with a synthesis or not; and that 
 all our propositions, when fully and unelliptically expressed, are 
 Identical propositions. When I say the boat is swift, it is because 
 I know it to be so,—because I know it to be of a swift one that I 
 am speaking; and because, speaking of it to others, I am able, 
 from this knowledge, to indicate swiftness as a quality of it, and, 
 therefore, as a part of it. If I do not know that it is a swift boat 
 that I am speaking of—if all that I know is that it is a boat of 
 some kind, I cannot do this. How, in such a case, could I possibly 
 do this ? To say that the set of abstract qualities which we call a 
 boat has the quality swiftness among its other qualities, is simply 
 not true. It could never be true. Hamilton, as I have remarked, 
 does not say this. All that any one can possibly intend to say, 
 all that he has said, is, that a swift boat consists of certain parts 
 or elements, one of which is swiftness. Thus every judgment must 
 proceed, can only proceed, from knowledge, not from ignorance. 
 We cannot, therefore, say the boat is swift until we have the know¬ 
 ledge that it is so. But when we have this knowledge or concept 
 
JUDGMENT. 
 
 37 
 
 of a swift boat, we have a logical whole, of which swiftness is 
 one part. 
 
 Upon what principle can it be that Mr. Mill, agreeing with us 
 in all the rest of what has been here said, denies this use of the 
 term ‘ part/ and asserts that the swiftness, instead of being a part 
 of the swift boat, is only added to the swift boat, existing along 
 with it; the swift boat and the swiftness constituting thus the two 
 parts of some other unnamed whole ? What does he mean by 
 saying that the swiftness predicated of the swift boat—and which 
 Hamilton says, being predicable of it, is part of it—is not part of it, 
 but only along with it ? If Hamilton had said that swiftness was 
 ‘ an attribute or determination’ of a boat not known to be either 
 swift or slow, or known to be neither, and was part of it, this indeed 
 Mr. Mill might very reasonably have objected to. Swiftness would 
 be no part of such a boat, but would, when along loith it, become a 
 part—not, I repeat, of such a boat, but of a swift boat thus created, 
 i.e ., of the whole that is made up of swiftness, and of the boat that 
 was not known to be either swift or slow. If Hamilton had con¬ 
 tradicted all this, Mr. John Mill’s antics here would have resulted 
 from a zeal for truth. But Hamilton has not done so, nor anything 
 that could be mistaken for it. On the contrary, he has said very 
 distinctly that swiftness could not be regarded as part of such a 
 boat, and could not be predicated either as being part of it or as 
 not being part of it; and that swiftness was part only of a swift 
 boat,—of the group of qualities so called, of which group it was 
 one ; and assuredly it is this. The part of a whole is that without 
 which the whole could not exist,—without which the rest of the 
 whole is only another part. Thus if A+B=a whole, then A is not 
 part of B, but part of A+B ; and B alone is as much part of A+B, 
 as A alone is. We see then clearly that swiftness is not part of 
 what we understand by the word * boat,’ nor said by any one to be 
 so, but only of a swift boat; and we see beyond all room for ques- \ 
 tion that it is that, since every judgment is analytic and identical. 
 We see that when an attribute is predicated affirmatively of a thing, 
 it is part of that thing; which is what Hamilton said, and all that 
 he said, and what Mr. Mill denies, saying that to hold this as per¬ 
 sistently as Hamilton and all logicians do, is being as consistent 
 as we need ever expect Hamilton and the logicians to be! 
 
 I have now carefully looked at Mr. Mill’s denial of Hamilton’s 
 statement (which statement, be it ever remembered, is, as I have just 
 
38 
 
 JUDGMENT. 
 
 said, that of all Logicians) in every possible point of view, just as if 
 Mr. Mill were quite serious in making it, and as if he really were the 
 blockhead that such a denial implies. But I am very far from 
 thinking that he is. I am persuaded he intended it only for those 
 ignorant and infatuated partisans with whom it has so well suc¬ 
 ceeded, and that it was merely a histrionic artifice whereby he should 
 seem to be cutting off his Giant’s head ; and an artifice highly credi¬ 
 table, indeed, it must be admitted to be, to the knowledge of the 
 world, that suggested it. The stage-effect of the thing has been com¬ 
 pletely successful, and those of Mr. John S. Mill’s critics are much 
 nearer the fact than they suppose, who say that all that he has said 
 against Hamilton is groundless, but that he himself is a very sharp 
 and intelligent writer. All I would say to these critics is, Why do 
 they not carry these two very just reflections a little further ? 
 
 But here, as in the last chapter, they will argue, Why may not 
 Mr. Mill make ‘ a mistake,’ as well as others ? Why may he not 
 be sometimes misled by ‘a little animusV I answer, as before, 
 that it depends on the ‘ mistake.’ It depends on whether the 
 ‘ mistake’ is one which only a blockhead could make, or one which 
 even a sharp, clever reviewer like Mr. Mill might have fallen into ; 
 and it depends also on whether the whole book consists of these, 
 or whether we find but one or two of them. What I said of the 
 former chapter and its ingenious misrepresentations applies here 
 also. If there were in the whole book but one or two such misre¬ 
 presentations as the present one, I should have concluded that they 
 were ‘ mistakes/ and that the present one was a * mistake/ I should 
 have here concluded that when Hamilton says the quality, predi¬ 
 cated of the group in which it exists, is part of the group, Mr. Mill 
 supposed him to have said that the quality, predicated of the group 
 in which it does not exist, is part of that group,—that swiftness, 
 for instance, is part of the boat that is known not to be either swift 
 or slow. But I appeal to the reader who can understand these 
 words, whether this is not the mistake of the idiot instead of the 
 mistake of a * clever’ man ? And if, as. we shall see, every chapter 
 contains a similar ‘ mistake,’ are we to go on, chapter after chapter, 
 describing this nonsensical rubbish everywhere as the ‘ mistakes and 
 oversights’ of a ‘ clever’ man under the influence of a little animus ? 
 Would this not be almost, if not entirely, lowering one’s-self to the 
 intellectual level of those ‘ clever’ Rationalists who acknowledge 
 themselves unable to see a single inaccuracy, or, at the utmost, 
 
JUDGMENT. 
 
 39 
 
 more than one or two inaccuracies, in the whole book ? Would 
 this not be to take part one’s-self in Mr. Mill’s ignoble pantomime ? 
 -—for ignoble, with all humble respect and deference, he must allow 
 us to regard it. 
 
 We see, then, that there is here no longer any question as to 
 whether we judge of things by means of our conceptions of them, 
 or whether we judge of them without having any conceptions of 
 them at all. The whole question now between Mr. Mill and us, 
 or, as he delights to say, between him and Sir W. Hamilton, is as 
 to whether the attribute of a thing is part of the thing; not, be it 
 well observed, as to whether one attribute of a thing is part of 
 another of its attributes, nor as to whether that which is not the 
 attribute of a thing is part of the thing, but simply as to whether 
 the attribute or quality qualifying any object is or is not part of 
 that object. Mr. Mill writes twenty-four pages of his book to 
 prove that it is not part of it, and that Hamilton’s ignorance is 
 insufferable when he says it is; that no intelligible meaning 
 ‘ emerges’ from the statement; that much vagueness of thought lurks 
 under the specious appearance of philosophical precision which 
 distinguishes it; that it is the very crown of those sown things 
 which resemble self-contradictions (what can Mr. Mill mean by 
 this strange metaphor ?) ; finally, that Hamilton’s thus describing 
 the attributes of things as parts of the things, makes one despair 
 of ever getting at the truth of anything. 
 
 Moreover, as I have just said, the real question now at last is 
 entirely about the things themselves and their attributes; not, as 
 in the former chapter, about the symbols with which we think of 
 ' either. It is necessary, also, to fix carefully our attention upon this ; 
 for much effort is here made to conceal the fact. Hot only does 
 Mr. Mill fully admit in the former chapter and in this that we 
 can judge of things by our conceptions of them quite as well as we 
 can, without any conceptions of them at all, by means of words 
 only; but he also concedes it as indubitable, that whatever sym¬ 
 bols we use (whether conceptions or mere conceptless words), the 
 relation of part and whole, if it exists between the things and 
 their attributes, will exist also between the symbols of these; as, 
 for instance, if A is the symbol for a house, and B for a room in 
 it, then if the room is part of the house, B also is part of A. 
 What we have now to settle, therefore, regards only the things 
 themselves, and the attributes themselves, not the symbols of them, 
 
40 
 
 JUDGMENT. 
 
 with which we judge of them. Are the attributes parts of the 
 things, or are they not ? That is the whole question, and of this, 
 when set forth in honest language, every reader can judge. 
 
 Minor Issues. 
 
 I next proceed to indicate the four arguments by which Mr. 
 Mill seeks to make it appear probable that the attribute of a thing 
 is not part of the thing—the predicate in a judgment not part of 
 the subject, and with which he dexterously surrounds this point 
 as with a circle of enchanted castles, in each of which, in succes¬ 
 sion, he professes to overthrow the Giant. He tells us that if the 
 quality were part of the qualified object, as all Logicians assert, 
 and Hamilton at the head of them, the four following incon¬ 
 sistencies would result:—(1.) This would contradict Hamilton’s 
 own statement exactly three pages previously in his Lectures. 
 (2.) This would make it necessary to hold that we judge of things 
 as we know them, not as they are in themselves. (3.) This would 
 make it necessary to hold that we cannot predicate individuals of 
 one another; and (4.) This would ignore the fact that all our 
 judgments are attended with a synthesis in the minds of those 
 who are unacquainted with the facts we speak of. 
 
 1. ‘ If the quality were part of the qualified object, the predicate 
 ‘ part of the subject, the effect of this would be to contradict Hamil- 
 ‘ ton’s own statement exactly three pages previously in his Lectures 
 This is pure fiction. The terms in which Hamilton gives the 
 definition of Judgment (quoted by Mr. Mill, pp. 344-5), saying that 
 swiftness is part of a swift boat, do not contradict, as Mr. Mill sup¬ 
 poses they do, the terms in which Hamilton gives the same defi¬ 
 nition (quoted pp. 341-2), saying that in judgment we discern the 
 relation of congruence between a boat on the one hand, and swift¬ 
 ness on the other, inasmuch they are both parts of the subject or 
 mental representation, a swift boat. Instead of a contradiction, 
 there is, every Logician knows, the completest harmony between 
 these two statements, as is well explained by Hamilton in the 
 three pages which intervene between them in his Lectures. It is 
 precisely because the qualities called a boat are compatible with 
 the quality called swiftness, that swiftness can be part of a swift 
 boat. 
 
JUDGMENT. 
 
 41 
 
 Hamilton explains, as quoted p. 343, that the relation of con¬ 
 gruence, here intended, is £ coincidence,’ the ‘ being blended into 
 one,’ or the being ‘ conceived as one;’ and that this union can 
 only be effected where one of the two things in question ‘ can be 
 an attribute or determination of the other,’—where the swiftness, 
 for instance, can be an attribute of the boat. It is, he explains 
 ('ibid .), impossible for us to think of, as one, two qualities, or groups 
 of qualities, or a quality and a group, when neither of the two can 
 qualify the other,—when they can both of them only qualify some 
 one other thing, but not one another; as, for instance, magnanimity 
 and length. Does Mr. Mill mean to tell us that this distinction 
 is too profound for him ? or if, contrary to what he pretends, he is 
 able to see it, does he mean to say that, in the former case, each 
 attribute in a group is not part of the group of which it is one, 
 although, in the latter case, each attribute only exists along with 
 the other attributes, and is not part of them ? Every one of his 
 readers, whether they acknowledge it or not, will discern, and be 
 shocked to discern, Mr. Mill’s ‘ misapprehension’ here. It is that 
 of a school-boy. There is not, it is obvious, the least self-contra¬ 
 diction in Hamilton’s words. There is not even the semblance 
 of any. 
 
 All that Mr. Mill seeks to make out in this place, from p. 341 
 to p. 346, about two Theories of Judgment, as he calls them, is too 
 paltry to detain the reader with it, not to say too mean, in any other 
 except that jesting sense which most people acquainted with these 
 subjects will, I think, agree with me in attributing to the whole book. 
 ISTor is it necessary under this head to point out the utter ignorance 
 of Logic exhibited at p. 342 and p. 345 in Mr. Mill’s jumble of 
 what Hamilton says so truly and so clearly about the congruence 
 of two propositions (of riches and beauty, for instance, predicated 
 of the same subject); and what he says, with equal truth and 
 clearness, about the congruence of the two terms in the subject of 
 any one proposition, Mr. Mill supposing that the congruence of 
 unity, when swiftness and greatness yield great swiftness, is the 
 same as the congruence of compatibility when the boat is large 
 and swift, and Mr. Mill consequently peering, amidst the roars of 
 his audience, into the notion swiftness for the notion greatness, 
 and into the notion riches for the notion beauty, just as one would 
 look for anything in an empty jug. Then, as to the childish 
 question at p. 344, Do we ever think of electricity as being 
 
42 
 
 JUDGMENT . 
 
 characterized and conditioned by polarity, so that we can have but 
 the one notion polar electricity ? Do we ever think of swiftness 
 as being characterized and conditioned by greatness, so as to have 
 but the single notion great swiftness from them ? Of such a ques¬ 
 tion I need take no further notice than to remark, that all who are 
 old enough to know what these words mean, know that we do ; 
 and, as a proof, if proof were needed, that Mr. Mill only employed 
 here, as usual, the specious appearance of philosophical precision, 
 and was w T ell aware that there was no truth in what he said, he 
 proceeds immediately more suo to contradict himself, and acknow¬ 
 ledges, in answer to his own question, that we do think of them as 
 a single notion, of which they constitute the two elements, just as 
 two and two constitute the single notion four. His scornful ques¬ 
 tion against Hamilton’s illustration is, ‘Do we ever think (of) the 
 two attributes electrical and polar as a single notion V His 
 answer to his own question is (yes), ‘ We think (of) them as dis¬ 
 tinct parts of the same (single) notion! Of course, he took it for 
 granted that the class of readers for whom he wrote would here 
 detect nothing ; but are we to believe his critics adverse or friendly 
 who tell us that he was serious when he asked that question ? 
 
 2. ‘ If the quality were regarded as part of the qualified object 
 f (the predicate part of the subject), this would make it necessary to 
 1 hold that we judge of things as we know them, not as they are in 
 ‘ themselves’ (see from p. 346 to p. 348 inclusive, and from p. 352 
 to the word ‘ Ptolemy’ in p. 354). The first question that here sug¬ 
 gests itself is, How are we otherwise to judge of things than as we 
 know them,—than according to our knowledge, conception, or notion 
 of them ? How can we judge of them according to what we do not 
 know of them,—without any knowledge or conception or notion of 
 the things we judge of? As long as we have a thing present to 
 the senses, we may say, in a certain vague sense, that we judge of 
 the thing itself, but even then it is not strictly true. The thing 
 itself is indeed before our senses, but how much of it do we cor¬ 
 rectly recognise ? How much do we not add to it that is not in 
 it ? How much of it do we not omit altogether ? Even then, 
 with the thing before us as it really is, we judge of it only accord¬ 
 ing to the notion, concept, or knowledge that we are then able to 
 adjust or readjust respecting it; and we find, as all know, different 
 people sometimes forming very different notions or conceptions 
 of precisely the same sense-phenomenon. But when the sense- 
 
JUDGMENT. 
 
 43 
 
 phenomenon is no longer present, how else can we judge of it but 
 according to our conception of it,—according to what we know of 
 it ? That we can otherwise judge of it is the cardinal point of Mr. 
 Mill’s alleged theory,—a point which he nowhere explains, and 
 which every one of his readers will be able to see he cannot 
 explain. We do not see, therefore, how our being thereby obliged to 
 judge of things according to our conception of them would be any 
 serious calamity, or constitute any very solid objection to our hold¬ 
 ing that the attribute of a thing is part of a thing, even supposing 
 that these two propositions were, in any conceivable way, con¬ 
 nected with one another. But they are not. Our proposition is, 
 that, whether we have a conception of the thing we are talking 
 about or not, whether we have any knowledge of it or not, the 
 attributes of that thing are parts of that thing. 
 
 But this is not all under this head that requires to be adverted 
 to. We have the dog here returning to the food which its stomach 
 had just rejected. In the 17th chapter Mr. Mill acknowledged 
 that there was no truth in what he had been saying against the 
 doctrine, that we think with our conceptions of things, and not 
 either with the real things themselves, nor yet with mere words; 
 and in the first of the Minor Issues in the present chapter, in the 
 first objection to qualities being parts of things (which occupies the 
 first six pages of his chapter), we had Mr. Mill advancing boldly 
 into the world of thoughts, knowledge, concepts, and notions, and 
 thinking like other men, and speaking of our concepts of things 
 as exactly corresponding symbols of the things themselves,—as so 
 exactly corresponding, that to compare the one was to compare the 
 other. Here he comes, however, before us once more with an evi¬ 
 dent relish still remaining for the old disgusting fiction about think¬ 
 ing without knowledge, and disguising himself in the grinning mask 
 of this something he calls ‘ Conceptualism,’ in the hope of fright¬ 
 ening us back, if possible, into the confusions and meshes of his 
 17th chapter. 
 
 The question upon which we are now engaged is, he tells us 
 (p. 345), as to whether the attribute of a thing is a part of its 
 group, as well as along with the other attributes of its group; and 
 this, he admits, is the whole question. He then tells us in the very 
 next page, that the first objection to this, which, he thinks, must 
 occur to any one is, that it would limit our judgments to our know¬ 
 ledge ; that it would render it necessary for us to compare our con- 
 
44 
 
 JUDGMENT. 
 
 ceptions of things when we require to judge of the things them¬ 
 selves ! As a reply to Hamilton’s having used the expression ‘ a 
 part of,’ instead of ‘ along with,’ he there puts this question,— 
 What! Do we never compare anything but notions—anything but 
 our conceptions of things ? Do we never compare the things them¬ 
 selves ? We may ask him in turn,—Does he never compare any¬ 
 thing but notionless words ? Does he never compare actual things 
 instead of words? We shall probably, both of us, return the same 
 answer, that it is things only that we do ultimately compare—that 
 we are at all ultimately interested in comparing; but that we 
 require symbols to compare absent things, and that we only com¬ 
 pare,—he, his words, and we, our notions ; because we employ these 
 respectively as symbols of the things. We, on our side, say further, 
 that notions are quite as good symbols of things as mere notionless 
 words are. We will venture to add, much better. Nay, so much 
 better, that we defy him to show how he can do anything at all 
 with his symbols (viz., words alone), or how he can make a single 
 step without some concept (or conception) of the thing he thinks 
 about. 
 
 But even if he can think of a thing, as he pretends, without 
 any conception whatever of what he is thinking about, will he 
 be good enough to say how this proves that the attribute, which 
 is one in a group of attributes, is not part of the group of which 
 it is one? What is the meaning of putting forward such a 
 puerile objection as this to the obvious fact, recognised by all 
 Logicians, that the attribute is not only along with the other attri¬ 
 butes of its own group, but is apart of the group itself? Would 
 not this clearly be the case, whatever the symbols were (thought- 
 symbols or word-symbols) which might be employed by us as the 
 instruments of reflection ? How can the attribute of a thing be part 
 of a thing when the symbols employed are two words, and not be 
 equally well part of it when the symbols are two thoughts ? What 
 are we to call such reasoning as that with which we are here 
 presented ? 
 
 But Mr. Mill goes further. He not only writes as if he consi¬ 
 dered that the impossibility of our having notions or conceptions of 
 things would make it impossible for the attribute to be a part of its 
 group, but he also leaves the question respecting the attribute which 
 is now the sole question before us, and occupies two pages and a 
 half in seeking to recover some of the rejected dainty, and to prove 
 
JUDGMENT. 
 
 45 
 
 that thinking with notions instead of words upsets all possibility of 
 belief or truth. He frankly admits, however, more suo, (ibid.), that 
 his statement is without the least foundation, reconciling himself to 
 this abrupt failure of his reasoning upon some hocus-pocus principle 
 which he calls ‘ the entire inversion of the logical process of defini¬ 
 tion,’ It is therefore unnecessary to do more than to remind the 
 reader that, even if the statement had been well founded, it would 
 have had nothing whatever to do with the question respecting the 
 attribute being a part of its group, and to draw the reader’s attention 
 to the other ‘ sowings of self-contradiction, which are crowned’ here. 
 Mr. Mill assures us also, that there cannot be such a thing as a false 
 judgment, but only a true one, and that belief likewise is an ‘essen¬ 
 tial element’ in every judgment (p. 347). But before he finishes 
 his two pages and a half, he, more suo, again admits that a judgment 
 may be entirely false, as well as true, and entirely disbelieved as 
 well as believed. What is a pantomime if this is not a pantomime ? 
 
 3. ‘ If the quality were part of the qualified object (the predicate 
 * part of the subject), this would make it necessary to hold that we 
 ‘ cannot predicate individual objects of one another, which in Hamil- 
 1 ton would be an inconsistency .’—The portion of the chapter in 
 which Mr. Mill expounds himself upon this point extends from the 
 end of p. 348 to p. 354, and is so preposterously inconsistent with 
 fact throughout, as well as wholly constructed upon equivocal ex¬ 
 pressions, that I defy any of his admirers, any even of his most 
 adverse critics, to make it, in the least degree, probable that he was 
 serious when he put it forward. 
 
 Mr. Mill’s object in it is to make it appear that Hamilton’s 
 definition of Judgment is inconsistent with Hamilton’s teaching 
 elsewhere. 
 
 To do this, Mr. Mill places before us two propositions. In one 
 he asserts, without proof, that one individual object cannot be a 
 part, in Logic, of another. In the other proposition he proves to 
 us, at considerable length, that Hamilton regards one individual 
 object as predicable of another. 
 
 When Hamilton, therefore, here states the predicable (or predi¬ 
 cate) to be always a Logical Part, he denies, says Mr. Mill, that 
 an individual can be the predicable. 
 
 Now, any one can see that the truth of this conclusion depends 
 upon the truth of Mr. Mill’s assertion that one individual cannot 
 be the Logical part of another. This assertion, which is notoriously 
 
46 
 
 JUDGMENT. 
 
 contrary to all fact, lie does not even pretend to prove, but lavishes 
 pages of proof upon the other proposition (that Hamilton regards 
 one individual as predicable of another)—a proposition too well 
 known to require any proof at all. 
 
 This is the whole of the subject now to be considered; but I 
 trust that the reader will bear with me while, for greater clearness, 
 I set this matter before him in two or three further different ex¬ 
 pressions of it, rendered necessary by the large amount of compli¬ 
 cation with which Mr. Mill has endeavoured to invest it. 
 
 He here asserts, that since predicates are Logical (also called 
 Metaphysical) Parts, one individual object cannot be predicated of 
 another,—cannot be combined in judgment with another. He 
 does not employ a single argument to justify this conclusion, but 
 affects an ignoratio elenchi ,—affects to mistake what he had to 
 prove, and devotes the pages ostensibly occupied with this point 
 to proving (what needed no proof) that Hamilton, as well as all 
 other Logicians, considered individual objects predicable of one 
 another,—capable of being judged of with reference to one another 
 precisely in the same way as general concepts are. 
 
 In other words, Mr. Mill says that, according to the ordinary 
 definition of Predication or Judgment as here given by Hamilton, 
 the predicate is part of what is true of the subject, and that, as 
 this is the case, one concrete object cannot be the predicate of 
 another,—cannot be assigned as the qualifying circumstance of 
 another, being unable, says Mr. Mill, to be the Logical part of 
 another; yet that Hamilton is, in his Lectures on Metaphysics, 
 guilty of the gross inconsistency of teaching that one concrete 
 object can be predicated of another. 
 
 It is important to draw attention to the fact, that Mr. Mill 
 himself, anything that he may have elsewhere said to the contrary 
 notwithstanding, admits, as fully as any of us, that the predicate 
 is always part of the subject, as stated in Hamilton’s definition, 
 and that a general conception cannot only be such a predicate, but 
 also such a part. It is only of the individual object that he denies 
 the possibility of its being either a predicate or a part. He holds, 
 he tells us, that concrete objects differ materially in this respect 
 from mere genera; that such objects can in no case be judged of 
 with reference to each other,—in no case be predicated of each 
 other; and he acknowledges himself to be driven to this extra¬ 
 ordinary conclusion by the fact that such objects cannot be Logical 
 
JUDGMENT. 
 
 47 
 
 Whole and Part to one another,—a relation which, as I have said, 
 he has the candour here to admit subsists between every predicate 
 and its subject. We cannot, for instance, judge of St. Paul’s, he 
 says, with reference to London, so as to predicate London of St. 
 Paul’s in any relation whatever; and the reason of this singular 
 peculiarity is, he further tells us, because London can constitute 
 no Logical Part of it. The only possible part here, of any kind, is, 
 we are told, St. Paul’s, and that is a physical part, not a Logical 
 one. His words are more explicit upon this point than he can 
 generally afford to furnish us with. ‘ How, a concept, that is, a 
 ‘ bundle of attributes, may,’ says Mr. Mill, p. 349, ‘be a part of 
 ‘ another concept, and may be a part of our mental image of an 
 ‘ individual object; but one notion of an individual object cannot 
 ‘ be a part of another notion of an individual object. One object 
 ‘ may be an integrant part of another, but it cannot be a part in 
 ‘ Comprehension or in Extension, as these words are understood of 
 ‘ a concept. St. Paul’s is an integrant part of London, but neither 
 ‘ an attribute of it nor an object of which it is predicable.’ How, 
 he is quite right in saying that, if concrete objects cannot be 
 Logical Parts, they cannot be judged of with reference to one 
 another,—they cannot be predicates. Hamilton and all of us agree 
 with him in this. But why can they not be Logical Parts ? Here 
 is the whole question, yet here Mr. Mill maintains a profound 
 silence, and merely relies upon our supposing that as London is 
 not a physical part of St. Paul’s, it cannot enter into it as a part in 
 Comprehension,—it cannot, as an epithet, form a Logical Part of it. 
 
 We then have Hamilton’s alleged inconsistency. What Mr. 
 Mill works at in all this, is to make it appear that Hamilton, 
 by saying, as we all do, that the predicate is part of the subject, 
 unconsciously agrees with him in holding that there can be no 
 judgment,—no predication,—of concrete objects, and yet that 
 Hamilton has the absurdity to say elsewhere that there is this 
 predication of the concrete. The agreement with himself, he 
 wishes to persuade us, is clear from the passage just now quoted, 
 expressive of his own conviction that the concrete is not predicable, 
 combined with Hamilton’s statement, that in every judgment the 
 predicate is part of the subject. The inconsistency of this alleged 
 agreement with Mr. Mill is, we are told, to be found in the first 
 and second volumes of the Lectures, in which Hamilton ex¬ 
 plains how all our first predications are of concrete things only. 
 
48 
 
 JUDGMENT. 
 
 It is obvious that the alleged inconsistency, and the alleged 
 agreement depend entirely, as I have already said, upon the truth 
 or falsehood of Mr. Mill’s assertion, that concrete objects cannot 
 be Logical Parts ; for all parties are agreed that to be capable of 
 being a part in Logic is to be predicable. The whole question 
 therefore is, are concrete objects not predicable ? Can they not be 
 such parts? Can they not be judged of with reference to one 
 another ? Can they not be combined in Judgment ? One single 
 reason for saying that they cannot Mr. Mill does not give. He 
 gives plenty of unneeded proof that Hamilton holds the concrete 
 to be predicable. He does not give one word of proof that the 
 concrete cannot be a part in Logic as well as the abstract. To 
 prove what did not require proof, and to leave unproved what did, is 
 an ignoratio elenchi ,—I will add, an affected one on Mr. Mill’s part. 
 
 By means of this ignoratio elenchi , Mr. Mill seeks to make it 
 appear that Hamilton is guilty of an enormous self-contradiction. 
 This is the sole object of the six pages. All Logicians are agreed— 
 1. That Predication or Judgment employs concrete objects as Pre¬ 
 dicates quite as much as it employs abstract qualities for that 
 purpose; and 2. That all Predicates are Logical Parts of their 
 respective subjects. Mr. Mill affects to think these two proposi¬ 
 tions incompatible with one another; but instead of showing how 
 they are so, or that they are so, he takes it for granted that this is 
 clear to the reader, and employs long quotations and a large amount 
 of his ‘ triumphant animadversion’ in proving, as if this -were what 
 he had to prove, that Hamilton held the first of these propositions 
 (about the concrete predicates), hoping that we should infer for 
 ourselves from the animadversions and big words how excessively 
 —nay, distressingly, inconsistent Hamilton was in holding the 
 second also; how this was the crown of all the self-contradictions 
 he had sown ; how he must renounce one theory or the other ; how 
 the least that could be required of him would be to have one 
 theory for concrete predicates, and one for those that are abstract; 
 how, when he was occupied with either of them, he must have 
 temporarily forgotten the other, etc., etc. This is all very clever, 
 and very well; but why omit the proof of the only point in ques¬ 
 tion ? Why omit to explain how the two propositions are incom¬ 
 patible with one another ? Would this have been omitted if the 
 writer had been in earnest ? 
 
 The ignoratio elenchi , as here employed, is a portion of Mr. 
 
JUDGMENT . 
 
 49 
 
 Mill’s ordinary apparatus with the less informed of his readers. It 
 is the ‘ Coat of Darkness’ with which Jack approaches unseen to the 
 very head of the Giant. He puts on the appearance of reasoning 
 fairly at great length upon the point at issue, hut is really quoting 
 and writing, and very fair, upon a totally different point, which is 
 not, to the smallest extent, at issue, but which he has dexterously 
 managed that the reader should suppose identical with the one 
 which is at issue. Instead of proving to us, as he has done, from 
 Hamilton’s clear and searching analysis, that our general concepts 
 are furnished to the mind by our judgment of individual objects, 
 and that Hamilton agreed with the rest of mankind upon this 
 point (all which we all knew before), and making it seem from his 
 censorious phraseology that in all this Hamilton was proving him¬ 
 self wrong, what the case required was that Mr. Mill should have 
 shown how the predicate’s being always part of its own subject 
 made it impossible to predicate one concrete object of another. 
 This he has not even attempted to show. He has merely asserted 
 it, and re-asserted it. 
 
 The foregoing summaries of his proposition will help the reader 
 to unravel the six tangled pages we have in this place to deal 
 with. I now proceed to reply to it. 
 
 And first, I shall take the liberty of tying Mr. Mill to the post 
 which he has affected not even to see, and ask him why he thinks 
 that one individual object is not predicable of another—cannot be 
 the logical part of another—cannot be that with reference to which 
 another is judged of; why he considers, for instance, that London 
 and St. Paul’s are not predicable of one another. All the explana¬ 
 tion he vouchsafes is that one individual can only be a physical 
 part of another individual; and that it is the general concept only, 
 if even that, not the individual concept, that can be a logical part; 
 that it is the group of abstract qualities, not the group of con¬ 
 crete qualities, that can, if any can, be predicated of anything. 
 But this is not explanation. It merely repeats his statement. 
 
 How, that the theory thus set up (about the unpredicableness of 
 concretes) is pure fiction upon Mr. Mill’s part, everybody knows, 
 who knows the meaning of the words he uses. It is not a ‘ mistake,’ 
 nor, in an intelligent writer like Mr. Mill, could be a ‘ mistake.’ 
 Let us look at the facts. When he says, p. 349, that St. Paul’s is 
 not an object of which London is predicable, he writes as if he 
 thought (what no one that knew anything of Logic could ever think) 
 
 D 
 
50 
 
 JUDGMENT. 
 
 that to predicate one thing of another is to say that the latter is the 
 former—is to declare the identity of the two; for that is the only 
 sense in which it can be said that London is not predicable of St. 
 Paul’s. He seems to think, for instance, that to predicate swiftness 
 of a boat is to say that a boat is swiftness, and that to predicate 
 London of St. Paul’s is to say that St. Paul’s is London. This 
 would be droll Logic indeed ; and Mr. Mill is quite right to condemn 
 it and repudiate it, if he suspects himself, or supposes that any one 
 else ever said such a thing. Ho one individual object can possibly 
 be another individual object, any more than one group of abstract 
 qualities can possibly be another group, nor one notion another 
 notion. But nobody ever intended to say that it could be, or that 
 it was. In no case does the logical statement amount to that. If 
 this were the meaning of Predication or Judgment, we could no 
 more predicate one general concept of another than one individual 
 concept of another, nor any one thing of any other thing. To pre¬ 
 dicate one thing of another, therefore, is not to say that the one 
 is identical with the other. This is not, in any case, the meaning of 
 the words ‘ to predicate,’ or ‘ to judge.’ They only mean the stating 
 in what respect the one object does or does not enter into the 
 qualifying circumstances of the other; and they denote quite as 
 often the denial of a positive quality as the affirmation of one. In 
 other words, to judge or predicate is to indicate the relation be¬ 
 tween two individual objects—the quality with which one thing 
 determines or conditions another; and the quality or attribute so 
 indicated is a logical part of the thing it qualifies. This is a very 
 different affair from declaring one thing to be something else dif¬ 
 ferent from what it is—something that it is not—something over and 
 above what it is, as Mr. Mill affects to suppose Judgment to declare. 
 There is no identification of this kind ever in question when we use 
 the word Judgment or Predication. Surely Mr. Mill knows that. 
 He admits that a general concept can be predicated of a subject—can 
 have a subject judged of with reference to it. We can say, This boat 
 is a swift boat. Does he understand this to mean that the abstract 
 group of qualities which we call ‘ a swift boat’ is the concrete 
 group we call ‘ this boat V If he does, he is wrong. The abstract 
 cannot be the concrete. We thought we had learned this from the 
 author of the chapter upon General Concepts (c. xvii., passim). If, 
 to escape from this self-contradiction, he professes to mean that the 
 abstract group is a physical part of the concrete group, he is wrong 
 
JUDGMENT . 
 
 51 
 
 again. He is in another self-contradiction. The abstract is nothing 
 
 o o 
 
 at all physical, or in any sense real. We thought we had learned 
 this from that doughty Nominalist who is too much of an Anti- 
 Eealist to have even any ‘ conception’ of the things he applies his 
 words to. He must therefore fall hack again upon his original 
 absurdity (the theory of identification), or he must indicate some 
 other signification for the words to ‘predicate’ and to ‘judge,’ 
 instead of that one, in order to justify his objection to the words 
 being applied to concrete objects. 
 
 I recapitulate what I have said. When we predicate the group 
 of abstract qualities, we do not predicate identity; we predicate 
 of the subject the fact that these qualities determine it, condition 
 it. In like manner, if we predicate the boat of the oar, or the oar 
 of the boat, we do not predicate identity. We predicate of the 
 one the fact that the other qualifies it, determines it, conditions it. 
 This is Predication. This is Judgment. This is the Part and the 
 Whole in Logic. If we predicate the boat of the oar, we say that 
 the oar stands to the boat in the relation of being too light to row 
 it with. The oar is too light for the boat. If we make the oar the 
 predicate,—if we predicate the oar of the boat, we say that the boat 
 stands to the oar in the relation of being too heavy to be rowed 
 with it. The boat is too heavy for the oar. This is what we mean 
 by predicating one concrete object of another; and this being too 
 heavy for the oar is a logical Part of the boat, and the being too 
 light for the boat is a logical Part of the oar. This is also what 
 happens when we predicate of St. Paul’s the fact that London 
 qualifies it (say, surrounds it), or of London, that St. Paul’s adorns 
 it. ‘ To predicate’ never has any other meaning than this. It 
 never means that the one thing is the other thing, as Mr. Mill 
 supposes it does. It never means this, even in the case of general 
 concepts, although there also Mr. Mill sometimes supposes it to 
 have this meaning. But let us listen to himself a little in the 
 details of his bewilderment upon this subject. 
 
 ‘ One notion of an individual object,’ says Mr. Mill, p. 349, 
 
 ‘ cannot be a part of another notion of an individual object;’ i.e., 
 our notion (or knowledge) of the boat’s keel is not part of our 
 notion (or knowledge) of the boat; and our notion of A’s being the 
 builder of the boat is not part of our notion of the boat; and our 
 notion of the boat’s not being the sea is no part of our notion of the 
 boat. In like manner, according to Mr. Mill, our notion of St. 
 
52 
 
 JUDGMENT. 
 
 Paul’s and our notion of the Tower are no portions of our know- * 
 ledge or notion of London; nor our notion of St. Paul’s being built 
 by Wren any part of our notion or knowledge of St. Paul’s. All 
 this is error or fiction, whichever we are to call it. One notion can 
 be part of the other; and neither the boat, nor the keel, nor the 
 builder, nor the sea, is a general concept, although each has been 
 predicated of the boat,' in its own relation to the boat. The same 
 is true of St. Paul’s and London. Every Logician knows,—in fact 
 every reader, whether he is a Logician or not, knows that what Mr. 
 Mill here states is inconsistent with the fact; for one notion of an 
 individual object can be, and often is, part of another such notion. 
 
 The physical part of anything, says Mr. Mill {ibid), cannot be 
 a part in Comprehension or Extension. Let us see. St. Paul’s is 
 part of London. Here London and St. Paul’s are predicated of each 
 other in the relation of physical whole and physical part. The 
 being a part of London is here a part, in Comprehension, of St. 
 Paul’s, just as being built by Wren is another part of it in Compre¬ 
 hension, or logical part of it; and these logical parts are as com¬ 
 pletely innumerable as its physical parts are. On the other hand, 
 the being a part of London is an Extended Whole, of which St. 
 Paul’s, the Tower, etc., are various parts in Extension. It is not 
 true, therefore, to say that the physical part of anything cannot be, 
 when predicated (or converted into an epithet) of the thing, a logical 
 part also—a part in Extension, or that the fact of being a physical 
 part is not a part in Comprehension. This also is mere fiction, and 
 what the veriest tyro in Logic knows to be mere fiction. 
 
 Mr. Mill says {ibid) that St. Paul’s is not an attribute of Lon¬ 
 don any more than it is of Paris. Can it be necessary to contra¬ 
 dict this ? An attribute, whether it be an abstract quality, or 
 the concrete qualifying object, denotes that which belongs to any¬ 
 thing, or is supposed to belong to it. Does not St. Paul’s belong to 
 London ? And if we seek for the logical part—the part in Com¬ 
 prehension, is not the fact of belonging to London this part in 
 Comprehension, of St. Paul’s ? and is not the fact of having St. 
 Paul’s in it a part of London in Comprehension ? But Mr. Mill 
 says St. Paul’s is not in any sense an attribute of London. Here 
 even a schoolboy will enlighten him. 
 
 Finally, he says {ibid) that St. Paul’s is not an object of which 
 London is predicable—that we cannot say, for instance, St. Paul’s 
 is not London. And suppose I predicate London of St. Paul’s as not 
 
JUDGMENT. 
 
 53 
 
 being, or as being, the Metropolis, whose most central point St. Paul’s 
 is, is that not predicating London of St. Paul’s ? And do we not pre¬ 
 dicate one individual thing always of another individual thing when 
 we mention the relation in which it stands to it, whatever that 
 relation may be, since every relation qualifies, determines, charac¬ 
 terizes, and being thus a quality, is part and parcel (logically or 
 metaphysically, not physically, speaking) of the thing it qualifies ? 
 What! we cannot say, in correct Logic—in correct predication, St. 
 Paul’s is not London ! Mr. John Mill is the son of Mr. James Mill! 
 —we cannot predicate the one individual object of the other! 
 Why, what on earth then can we predicate of anything, if we can¬ 
 not predicate such things of such things ? 
 
 If Mr. Mill had been, as so many of his critics suppose, a block¬ 
 head, it would have been easy here, as elsewhere, to have in the 
 usual way assigned him a misapprehension which would have led 
 such a person into all these confusions. We might have assumed 
 as most probable, for instance, that he confounded the noun-sub¬ 
 stantive and the noun-adjective together, fancying that, as of two 
 substantives denoting totally different objects, the one could not 
 well be the other, neither of them could be converted into an 
 epithet of the other, or, at least, that if this were done, it would only 
 be predicating of the one object, the epithet derived from the other 
 object, not the other object itself. This, we see, would imply for¬ 
 getfulness of that most obvious fact, already adverted to, that all 
 concepts (general as well as individual) are substantives, and that, 
 just as when we predicate swiftness, or any other general concept, of 
 an object, what we declare the object to be, is not swiftness—the 
 general concept’s substantive, but swift, or having swiftness—the 
 general concept’s epithet; so when we predicate one individual 
 object of another, it is only by employing it as an epithet, derived 
 from and exhibiting some relation of it to the other object, that we 
 can do this. The same principle applies to the concrete as to the 
 abstract group. I only mention this misapprehension, possible to 
 others, lest it should be supposed that I was overlooking anything 
 that might be said in favour of the ‘Stupidity and Vindictiveness’ 
 Theory, which the more gentle delight to call the ‘ Mistake and 
 ‘ Animus’ Theory, in accounting for the pages now under review. 
 But the blunder in question, as anything but a plaisanterie, would 
 be, I humbly suggest, of too childish a character to attribute it to 
 Mr. Mill. Nor is it at all credible, as some will fancy it is, that 
 
54 
 
 JUDGMENT. 
 
 Mr. Mill was in the least degree confused or misled by Hamilton’s 
 using the terms ‘ concept’ and ‘ notion’ as convertible, and of con¬ 
 crete as well as of abstract objects; or that he here imagined the 
 terms used in their restricted sense of abstract concepts only. That 
 Mr. Mill was aware of Hamilton’s practice in this respect, he him¬ 
 self states at pp. 338 and 346. 
 
 Can anything, then, be clearer than it is, that whatever concrete 
 objects are to one another in reality, they can be judged of each 
 other and predicated of each other as being that, and neither more 
 nor less? We cannot, of course, predicate affirmatively either 
 identity or any other relation between the two that does not exist. 
 We cannot say that St. Paul’s is London, or that London is smaller 
 than St. Paul’s. But we can predicate them affirmatively of one 
 another in that relation, whatever it is, in which they stand to one 
 another. Upon what grounds does Mr. Mill affect to deny that 
 we can do this ? In the Judgment, St. Paul’s is part of London, 
 or St. Paul’s is in the relation to London of being a physical part 
 of it: does Mr. Mill mean to say that the one object is not judged 
 of with reference to the other—is not predicated of the other ? Or 
 does he seek to assert that we have not here a Whole in Extension 
 and a Whole in Comprehension, as well as the corresponding Part 
 in each ? Or if Mr. Mill has been, as some of his admirers sup¬ 
 pose, puzzled by the fact that we cannot with truth and belief pre¬ 
 dicate identity affirmatively where it is not, any more than any 
 other relation where it is not, and has been thereby led to parade 
 his discernment that we cannot say St. Paul’s is London,—that we 
 cannot predicate this identity of two distinct individual objects, 
 any more than of two distinct general concepts, he will find, upon 
 reflection, that he can predicate things negatively of one another 
 even when he cannot do so otherwise,—that there are negative 
 judgments,—that he can say, for instance, St. Paul’s is not London, 
 and that this is what Hamilton has provided for in his definition 
 when he indicates the possibility of the notion predicated not con¬ 
 stituting a part of the other. Mr. Mill will find that, either affir¬ 
 matively or negatively, and in one relation, if not in another, all 
 concrete objects, or individual things, are predicable of one another, 
 and that there is not the faintest pretext for his assertion that in 
 Judgment, least of all in Hamilton’s definition of Judgment, * one 
 at least of the terms of comparison must be a (general) concept,’ 
 or that concrete concepts are not predicable of each other. 
 
JUDGMENT. 
 
 55 
 
 It is true that Mr. Mill immediately proceeds to back out of 
 this quagmire, admitting, more suo, in this very place, that his 
 whole argument was a sham. At p. 352, when speaking of those 
 first judgments, from which, as Hamilton so ably explains, our 
 general concepts or general notions are derived, and in which we 
 have nothing but individuals, and our notions or concepts of indi¬ 
 viduals, for predicate or subject, Mr. Mill says, ‘ The judgments 
 ‘ by which we constructed the (general) concepts have nothing 
 ‘ to do with comparison of (general) concepts. It is the Anscliau- 
 ‘ ungen , the intuitions, the presentations of Experience which we 
 ‘ in this case compare and judge’ (and therefore predicate of one 
 another, p. 352). And he likewise, it is true, withdraws from all 
 this Self-misrepresentation when he assents, as he does (p. 343), to 
 Hamilton’s first statement of the definition, in which it is more 
 explicitly mentioned that we can predicate one individual object 
 of another. He does, it is true, completely withdraw here, as 
 everywhere else, each of his nonsensical statements. But am I not, 
 on that very account, all the more entitled to ask, Can there he 
 any doubt that Mr. Mill acts thus intentionally ? Can there be any 
 doubt that he here consciously volunteers, in this reckless and 
 self-denying manner, to throw away any little reputation that he 
 might have enjoyed with his own party as a second or third-rate 
 Logician (and they placed him even higher),—representing himself, 
 as here, through several pages (348-354), utterly ignorant of the 
 commonest principle of Logic ? Can there be any doubt that he is, 
 here and everywhere, satisfied with the mere semblance of a triumph 
 over the Giant, and that he labours after this poor result for no 
 other assignable reason than to make thereby his court to a religious 
 party ? But even if I am mistaken in the motive I assign for this 
 strange conduct, can there be any doubt as to the strange conduct 
 itself ? and what are we to think of his admirers (for the most part 
 these very ‘ co-religionists’) who cheer him on, or rather push him 
 on, in this path of self- destruction, ignoring his withdrawals, how¬ 
 ever distinct, and declaring him in earnest, however frolicsome? 
 Cruel admirers ! 
 
 When we thus become aware that the concrete object and the 
 concrete concept are as predicable as the abstract, and that Hamil¬ 
 ton and everybody, except, indeed, if we are to suppose him serious, 
 Mr. Mill himself, hold this, it follows of course that the inconsis¬ 
 tency (that ‘ Sword of Sharpness’ so invaluable in a fight with 
 
56 
 
 JUDGMENT. 
 
 Giants) fabricated for Hamilton out of suclr cobweb matter as the 
 denial of this fact, becomes necessarily a mere optical illusion, and 
 even that, only to the more obtuse. It is, however, worth while to 
 observe with what self-possession, strut, and liveliness it is brand¬ 
 ished by little Jack. 
 
 Mr. John S. Mill having, as we have seen, adopted it as a fact 
 beyond all doubt, that one concrete object cannot be judged of with 
 reference to another—cannot be predicated of another, proceeds, 
 accordingly, with this proposition to construct the requisite incon¬ 
 sistency. He assures us, for instance, that Hamilton holds this 
 queer doctrine as well as himself—that he gathers the fact from 
 Hamilton’s saying that the predicate can always be a Part in Logic. 
 He then reminds us that Hamilton holds, as we all know, and as we 
 all hold, that we derive our genera from the interpredication of the 
 concrete. Mr. Mill even takes great pains, in his simulated ignora- 
 tio elenchi, to prove this. Hamilton’s inconsistency is thus complete. 
 How can we at once predicate the concrete and not predicate it ? 
 
 A strange part of this business is, that Mr. Mill admits, in his 
 own case also, the inconsistency with which he charges Hamilton. 
 He is obliged to admit, as we have seen, where he hoped it would 
 escape contrast, that we have our genera from concrete judgments, 
 yet all through these pages insists that there can be no such judg¬ 
 ments. He is precisely and really in the very position in which he 
 affects to find Hamilton, viz., in that of holding that we have our 
 classes from our judgments of concrete objects, but that we have no 
 judgments of concrete objects to have these classes from. Mr Mill’s 
 being here inconsistent is of no consequence. What is alone of 
 moment in all this is, that we should keep distinctly before us 
 Hamilton’s real position here. Mr. Mill admits (and, more suo, in 
 the very same page!) that Hamilton never said anything of the 
 kind he here imputes to him, but that he asserts the contrary ‘ in the 
 most decisive terms,’ insisting that it is from judgments, in which 
 only concrete objections and our conceptions of them are predicated 
 of each other, that we furnish ourselves with general conceptions, and 
 that there can be such judgments. Mr. Mill, nothing daunted, puts 
 on the ‘ Cap of Knowledge.’ He adopts the regress ab ignoto ad 
 ignotius ,—from what he knows nothing about, to what he knows 
 still less about,—from what Hamilton says to what Hamilton does 
 not say,—informing us that what he puts forward here as Hamilton’s 
 doctrine, in spite of Hamilton’s assertions and explanations to the 
 
JUDGMENT. 
 
 57 
 
 contrary, is a little discovery of his own,—an inference which he 
 draws from the important principle, discovered by himself, and just 
 laid down about concrete objects, not being capable of becoming 
 Logical Wholes and Logical Parts to one another. He argues that 
 since he himself has discovered that the concrete predicate cannot 
 be the Logical Part of its subject, Hamilton’s having said that 
 there is no judgment in which the predicate is not a Logical Part 
 of its subject, places it beyond all doubt that Hamilton did not 
 regard concrete objects as predicable of one another! Was there 
 ever anything so puerile as this so audaciously placed before en¬ 
 lightened men to think about ? Prom these two premisses—the first 
 a fiction, the second a fact—our would-be Logician infers, gravely, 
 we are told, and seriously infers, that Hamilton intended to say 
 that individuals are in no way predicable of one another, precisely 
 the contrary of what Hamilton did say,—nay, precisely the con¬ 
 trary of what ‘ is asserted,’ Mr. Mill tells us, ‘ in the most decisive 
 terms by Sir W. Hamilton himself!’ 
 
 Hamilton then, to support Mr. John S. Mill’s pantomime, must 
 be thus fantastically understood to contradict himself,—must be 
 understood to hold that there can be no inter-predications or judg¬ 
 ments of individuals at all (since he holds there can be no judgment 
 at all without this logical Whole and logical Part of which indivi¬ 
 duals are supposed not to be susceptible), yet that it is nevertheless 
 from these very non-existent judgments of individuals alone that we 
 have originally all our general notions. And Mr. Mill not only pre¬ 
 sents us with this singular inference respecting Hamilton—doltish 
 or burlesque, as we may choose to view it,—but begs of us, with 
 tears in his eyes, to reflect upon the shock and discouragement thus 
 given to all human research by so able a philosopher as Hamilton, 
 who, after explaining with the greatest care that all our predica¬ 
 tions or judgments —all without exception—begin in childhood by 
 our comparing nothing but individuals—nothing but concrete con¬ 
 cepts, concrete notions, notions of individuals, presentations of 
 individuals in sense, should, ‘ a little more than a hundred pages 
 after,’ have defined Predication or Judgment in such a way as, 
 upon Mr. Mill’s new principle, entirely to exclude from it all inter¬ 
 predication and inter-comparison of individual things. The scene 
 here becomes exciting. In the strong light of Mr. Mill’s patent 
 (viz., this impossibility of a Whole or Part in Logic) we discern 
 an enormous self-contradiction of Hamilton’s to bulk forth. The 
 
58 
 
 JUDGMENT. 
 
 1 triumphant animadversion,’ accordingly, is considerable—the 
 Critic in despair—Philosophy in ruins (Mr. Mill calls Logic every¬ 
 where ‘ Philosophy’)—and we find ourselves irresistibly compelled 
 again to recede with Mr. Mill, db ignoto ad ignotius, and to sym¬ 
 pathize with the thrilling pathos latent in the remark (p. 351 ) about 
 the crown of those sown things which self-contradictions so much 
 resemble ; hut as to what these sown things are which have crowns 
 in this compound metaphor, whether turnip bulbs, or cabbage 
 heads, or merely French parsnips, no ‘ intelligible meaning here, 
 first or last, emerges.’ 
 
 Mr. Mill, after assuming, upon the quixotic principle above in¬ 
 dicated (about a logical part being impossible in the concrete), that 
 Hamilton supposed we could not judge of St. Paul’s with reference 
 to London, nor of any concrete object with reference to another, re¬ 
 commences again that disgusting process which reminds us of sick 
 dogs and wallowing sows, and which, we hoped, in this case, we 
 had seen the last of. 
 
 He expends two more pages here in explaining to us that we 
 do not think with our conceptions of things. We are told that 
 whether we regard our knowledge of iron, rust and water, as old or 
 recent knowledge, we do not employ it when we judge of these 
 things. We do not employ, he tells us, mental symbols, or know¬ 
 ledge of any kind, to think about such things,—no, not even in the 
 absence of these things. We then think of them,—then, it would 
 seem, most of all,—without any conception of what we think about. 
 But that is, it seems, nothing wonderful. Even when they are 
 presentations of sense, we have no conception of them,—no know¬ 
 ledge whatever of what we perceive by sense. Is it not a mockery, 
 asks Mr. Mill, to speak to us of iron as it is known, and not as it 
 is in itself ? Is it water as it is known, or as it is not known, that 
 rusts iron ? and is it the iron as it is known that is rusted, or the 
 iron as it is not known ? When we think of iron or water for the 
 first time, or for the five hundredth time, can it be pretended, asks 
 Hamilton’s sportive Critic, that we do so with a notion of what we 
 are thinking about? and if we judge of water with reference to 
 iron, or, in other words, predicate water of iron, is it not clear that 
 we do so without any conception of what we are comparing,—any 
 conception of the water or of the iron ? All this is far too like the 
 ravings of a monomaniac to be accepted from Mr. Mill as the 
 serious expression of his convictions, or as anything else but a 
 
JUDGMENT. 
 
 59 
 
 joke. In the hope of more effectually mystifying his readers, he 
 uses the technical words ‘ thoughts/ ‘ concepts/ ‘ notions ; * but these 
 words always mean knowledge or conception. Hamilton said, as 
 we all do, that we could not judge of iron at all without a know 
 ledge, or conception, or notion, etc., of the objects which constitute 
 the elements of the judgment. Mr. Mill says we can, and do. He 
 says we can, and do, whether the things were known long before 
 or not. Certainly it matters very little whether our knowledge 
 was obtained five minutes ago or from the Ptolemies. All that we 
 insist upon is, that we must have the knowledge or conception of 
 what iron is before we form the smallest judgment about it; and 
 the same fact is true of water. To tell us that we judge of these 
 things without concepts—without a conception of each, is as like 
 a mockery as anything we can imagine ; yet Mr. Mill will have it 
 that the mockery is to say that we cannot judge of things without 
 a knowledge or conception of each thing. There are persons, no 
 doubt, who do judge of things in this way without distinct notions 
 of the different things they profess to judge of, but these are not the 
 persons whose judgment the world has usually found worth adopting. 
 
 Mr. Mill says we ought not to call iron or water a thought, a 
 knowledge, etc. Certainly not; no one does so. But we ought 
 to have the sense to see that when we require to compare these two 
 things together, all we can do is to compare our knowledge of the 
 one with our knowledge of the other, and what we think of the one 
 with what we think of the other. It would be a wild-goose chase 
 upon our part to seek to compare these two things, or any two 
 things, without having a knowledge of the one and a knowledge of 
 the other to compare together. Let Mr. Mill remember that when 
 he wishes to have words instead of conceptions adopted as the 
 symbols of things, he does not seem to think it necessary to regard 
 the thing called iron as a word. Why, then, suppose that we regard 
 it as a thought ? 
 
 To give a sample of Mr. Mill’s comic efforts in these last two 
 pages (353, 354) of the six, I need only observe, that when he 
 requires, as he often does, to dress up nonsense in the garb of 
 sense, he makes the interesting statement, that if we lived till 
 doomsday we should only be able to know what we should be able 
 to know, by obscurely saying, ‘ If we lived till doomsday we should 
 ‘ never find the proposition that water rusts iron in our concepts , 
 ‘ if we had not first found it in the outward phenomena/ He says, 
 
60 
 
 JUDGMENT . 
 
 in like manner, that when a thing has once got into our concepts, 
 it may get into our concepts ; a curious distinction, which he thus 
 expresses :—‘ When we have already judged this sequence to exist 
 ‘ outside us, we know it, and once known , it may find its way into 
 * our concepts! And again, when he wishes to say, We cannot find 
 in our knowledge anything hut what we know, or, in brief, we only 
 know what we know, he writes thus‘We cannot elicit out of a con- 
 ‘ cept any judgment which we have not first put into it, which we 
 ‘ have not consciously assented to in the act of forming the concept/ 
 For what grade of readers has he written these queer things ? 
 
 He next tells us (p. 354) that recollected knowledge is not 
 present knowledge. The latter he calls an ‘ artificial mental con¬ 
 struction,’ and thinks that the less of it we admit into our judg¬ 
 ments the better ; but he holds that we cannot judge without the 
 former,—that predicating or judging is comparing one memory 
 with another memory,—our memory of iron with our memory of 
 water. At least he says it is our memory we must consult, and 
 not the facts themselves. This looks like a return to common 
 sense on the part of our ‘ philosopher.’ He also says that our ulti¬ 
 mate appeal is not to our knowledge (our concepts), but to the 
 sense-presentations themselves. This, too, has a look of common 
 sense and serious writing. It admits that there is an appeal 
 (which is not ultimate) to our knowledge ; and when he speaks of 
 an appeal to sense, he means apparently only the verification or 
 augmentation of our knowledge, or, as he delights to call it, of our 
 concepts. The comic element, nevertheless, instantly bursts forth 
 again in the remark, that we judge the Earth to move without 
 having any conception or knowledge of movement or of the Earth, 
 and that if the question of fact depended on knowledge and con¬ 
 cepts, the victory would, he fears, have been with Ptolemy, whose 
 concepts on these points were limited, rather than with Copernicus, 
 in whom these concepts abounded! 
 
 In a note at p. 352, where little Jack brandishes his ‘ Sword 
 of Sharpness ’ for a moment in a corner before one of the other 
 Giants of the drama, and in the six pages of text upon which I have 
 been commenting, we find in a condensed form, from our jocular 
 Critic, some of the most senseless twaddle that has ever been 
 written in English under the name of ‘Philosophy;’ yet, even in 
 this section of his work, Mr. John S. Mill’s admirers, not omit¬ 
 ting those in the Westminster Review, would have us believe that he 
 
JUDGMENT . 
 
 61 
 
 is serious ! that he is incapable of a practical joke,—a practical 
 joke, they remind us, of such huge proportions, and that a large 
 amount of ignorance and stupidity is more credible than a large 
 amount of jocularity ! and this of Mr. Mill!— Credat Judceus. 
 
 4. If the quality were regarded as part of the qualified object (the 
 predicate part of the subject ), this would ignore the fact that all our 
 judgments are not only essentially Analytic , but attended also with 
 a certain synthesis of thought in the minds of those who are pre¬ 
 viously unacquainted with the facts stated in the judgments. Now, 
 not only does the theory of Whole and Part in Logic not ignore 
 this synthetic process, as Mr. Mill supposes it to do, but it insists 
 upon it as excellent illustration of the theory. Mr. Mill gives us 
 here again the hope that he will not imitate the nasty dog any more, 
 or the wallowing sow ; and that he will allow it to be an understood 
 thing that we compare our knowledge of one thing with our 
 knowledge of another thing, in order to find out how the one thing 
 may be predicated of the other, and that we do not seek to find 
 this out without knowledge, or comparing knowledge. He grants 
 us, although, apparently, only argumenti causa , that judging is, as 
 he phrases it, ‘ a notional operation, consisting of the recognition 
 of some relation between concepts/ and limits his present pro¬ 
 position to saying, that when we speak of wisdom or death as a 
 logical Part of Socrates, or swiftness as a logical Part of the swift 
 boat, we are ignoring the important distinction that in learning the 
 relations of things, we combine or synthesize, and that in stating 
 them we analyse. This proposition of his is wide of the fact. 
 We then, more than ever, insist upon this distinction, and read his 
 proposition in utter amazement at the extent to which the writer 
 here supposes his readers ignorant of what is meant by ‘ Analytic 
 Judgment/ An analytic judgment is an unfolding of what we 
 previously know. It is teaching, or imparting information. 
 Synthesis is combining for ourselves what we do not previously 
 know. It is learning or acquiring information. When we learn, 
 we do not judge. We then synthesize, i.e. we believe; we com¬ 
 bine things in our mind, as we are told to combine them, or as we 
 find by experiment that they are combined in nature. This hiving 
 of facts is all the synthesis of thought we know of. But this is | 
 not judging, it is only learning to judge. It is experimenting, and 
 making the guesses of induction. It is not Logic at all. It is at 
 most but appropriating the judgments of others. We cannot judge i 
 
62 
 
 JUDGMENT. 
 
 of, we cannot predicate, the relations between things until we 
 know them—until we have concepts (conceptions) of the things 
 and concepts of their relations. Synthetic Judgment, as it is called 
 by Mr. Mill, is not, I repeat, strictly speaking, what we term Judg ¬ 
 ment, or the expressmn of Knowledge, hut only the acquisition of 
 Knowledge,—the qualifying ourselves to form logical Judgments; 
 for analytic judgment, or rather Analysis, which is logical judg¬ 
 ment, is stating what we know. Thus, if I say, It is a fine day, to 
 a person unacquainted with the fact, this is to him a synthetic 
 judgment, if it is, as Mr. Mill tells us, to be called a judgment 
 at all; to me who have been out of doors and seen, it is an analytic 
 one. The fineness is, in my case, part of the knowledge or concep¬ 
 tion which I have of the day. In his case it clearly is not part of 
 the knowledge or conception which he has of the day until he 
 hears it from me, and not even then, unless he believes it upon my 
 authority. If he believes me, he synthesizes. He puts the two 
 things—fineness and this day—together, or, as Mr. Mill calls it, 
 forms a synthetic judgment, of which these are the two terms, 
 without their having been together before for him, and therefore 
 neither of them having been yet known by him to have the other 
 as part of it. In plain English, he learns the fact; and to call 
 what we learn a judgment of our own, is unusual in the extreme. 
 Mr. Mill’s account of an Analytic judgment passes muster. But 
 what he says of this Synthetic process, or learning, is idiosyncratic, 
 having the quintessence in it of a style of writing which henceforth 
 we may call ‘ Mill,’—saying what is rank nonsense, and yet seeming 
 to say something wise and .clever. He says that in a Synthetic 
 judgment we attribute something to the subject without having the 
 least knowledge or conception that this attribute is united to the 
 subject, and of course no conception therefore of its being part of 
 the subject, but only a conception of its being in point of fact united 
 to the subject! ‘ Synthetical judgments,’ writes Mr. Mill, p. 355, 
 
 ‘ affirm of a class (or individual) attributes which are not in the 
 1 concept (of the class or individual), and which we therefore do 
 ' not and cannot judge to be a part of the concept (of the class or 
 ‘ individual), but only to be conjoined in fact with the attributes 
 ‘ composing the concept’ (of the class or individual). Surely such 
 a combination of words as this could hardly be credited without 
 quotation as being Mr. Mill’s, and readers will naturally have 
 immediate recourse to the original to see that they are not, or 
 
JUDGMENT. 
 
 63 
 
 that I am not, deceived. It would hardly be believed, prior to a 
 minute examination of his writings, how much vagueness of thought, 
 leading to the unsuspecting admission of opposite doctrines in the 
 same breath (i.e., of unsuspecting absurdity), lurks under the specious 
 appearance of philosophical precision which distinguishes him. 
 We admit that the attribute cannot be part of the subject as we 
 conceive the subject, i.e., part of our concept or conception of it, 
 unless it is united to the subject as the part is united to its whole. 
 But what on earth is the meaning of saying that we assign an 
 attribute to a subject (fineness, for instance, to the day) without 
 the least knowledge of its being united to the subject, except 
 merely the knowledge of its being, in point of fact, united to it ? 
 All that is said upon the synthetic process, even such nonsense as 
 this, throws a very useful light upon what occurs in the opposite 
 case of an analytic judgment; and nothing can be more groundless 
 than to suppose that our common doctrine of logical analysis, as 
 being the indication of one or more of the component Parts in a 
 Whole, ignores the fact that in a logical synthesis there is nothing 
 of this kind,—ignores the fact that in synthesis the predicate is not 
 previously part of the subject, and that, in it, we have only the pro¬ 
 cess of combining the various qualities which are for the future to 
 be parts of the whole group. How does the theory of Part and 
 Whole in Logic ignore any of these distinctions between analytic 
 judgment and the synthesis ? Who but a Giant-killer would 
 ‘ have blown such a blast V 
 
 But we have as portions of this objection three singular inven¬ 
 tions by Mr. Mill, to which I must advert. 
 
 a. He is entirely misinformed when he speaks of the difference 
 between learning and teaching as a famous distinction in Meta¬ 
 physics, or as ever regarded by Hamilton, or by any one else, as of 
 the least importance. There is hardly anywhere any such distinc¬ 
 tion required or thought of. The naivete is admirable with which 
 Mr. Mill here discloses his ignorance, or, more correctly speaking, 
 as I think, the ignorance of those for whom he writes. Hamilton 
 never proposed the term ‘ ampliative ’ for the information conveyed 
 in the words, It is a fine day, or in any other similar judgment; 
 nor did any one ever see anything 4 psychologically’ famous in the 
 distinction between telling this and hearing this; nor does any 
 writer whatever obtrude it upon our attention. Those who are on 
 the look-out for the possible sources of Mr. Mill’s ‘mistakes’ will 
 
64 
 
 JUDGMENT. 
 
 probably tell us that he was here confounding Kant’s celebrated 
 proposition about an a priori synthesis with the common synthetic 
 processes about iron and water, when we first learn the relations of 
 these two objects to one another, and that had Mr. Mill been able 
 to read Kant in the original as Hamilton was, he would have 
 had a more correct ‘ concept’ of what Kant stated on the point 
 than he now exhibits. With all my heart, let it be so. Let 
 Mr. Mill be as great an ignoramus as his critics and admirers 
 please. I for my part can believe nothing of the kind. I shall 
 therefore merely remind the reader, that Mr. Mill not only denies 
 that the distinction of things a priori has anything very famous 
 about it, but absolutely denies ab initio that there could be any 
 such thing at all to distinguish from another thing as a Synthetic 
 Judgment a priori. He could not, therefore, look upon it as an 
 objection to the relation of Part and Whole between the predicate 
 and the subject, that this relation should ignore anything a priori. 
 Mr. Mill was only speaking of the synthetic processes of reading, 
 hearing, or induction and experiment, which processes, miscalled 
 by him ‘judgments,’ are none of them a priori —none of them 
 famous as distinct from regular analytic judgments—none of them 
 obtruded upon us in this relation by any one—none of them pre¬ 
 senting in this relation the smallest difficulty to the Philosopher, 
 or the slightest dissension among Logicians, least of all between 
 Mansel and Hamilton, who also, in spite of what Mr. Mill says, 
 perfectly agree even about the a priori synthesis. Every word 
 here written by Mr. Mill in order to carry on this Pantomime 
 exhibits an amount of self-abnegation in the form of affected 
 stupidity and ignorance that is hardly exceeded in any other 
 portion of the book. 
 
 ( b .) Mr. Mill is entirely ‘misinformed,’ also, when he states 
 that the term ‘ Concept’ has two meanings. It has not. It has 
 but one. He says that it denotes not only the same as conception, 
 our whole knowledge, notion, or conception of an individual or of 
 a class, but also that it denotes the specific difference, the few 
 essential attributes of a given class, upon which its being a class at 
 all is grounded, i.e., which we regard as constituting the difference 
 between it and the class above it. He thus not only limits the 
 term in one of its significations to a class only, but, singularly 
 enough, to the specific difference of that class ; and he tells us, with 
 the utmost gravity, that this latter is the more general import of 
 
JUDGMENT. 
 
 65 
 
 i the term. Now, the contrary is the fact. This import the word 
 never has at all in any writer. ‘ Concept’ denotes in no writer 
 anything except onr whole knowledge or conception of an indi¬ 
 vidual or of a class, just like the original term ‘ Conception,’ or our 
 ordinary term ‘ Knowledge;’ the form ‘ Concept’ having been pro¬ 
 posed instead of ‘ Conception,’ merely in order to leave the latter 
 to signify, exclusively, that mental process of conceiving by which 
 we form conceptions. Mr. Mill is entirely astray when he sup¬ 
 poses that any writer gives the word an interpretation different 
 from this, and entirely astray when he supposes that Hamilton has 
 altered its import in other writers to give it this one. Jack is 
 here very saucy, and lectures Giants generally upon what is and is 
 not ‘ lawful’ for them to do; but as he has made rather a poor 
 appearance as champion in this part of his evolutions, we must 
 excuse the priggish arrogance so playfully assumed in this and a 
 few other neighbouring passages. We must not, however, allow 
 the reader to overlook the attempt of Mr. Mill to invest the term 
 ‘ concept’ here and everywhere with as much confusion as possible, 
 and his obtrusion upon us, at every turn, of his extreme anxiety to 
 have his own bantling, ‘ connotation’ (never used by any writer in 
 the sense he uses it), substituted in its stead. Hamilton describes 
 the word ‘ concept’ as being exactly synonymous with conception,— 
 our whole conception, notion, or knowledge of a thing, and applies 
 it, Mr. Mill acknowledges, as much to concrete objects as to classes 
 (see p. 338). Neither Hamilton nor any other writer deviates in 
 the smallest particular from this acceptation of the term; nor need 
 I make any further remark upon this point than that all that we 
 are able to say about anything is what we know of it, or, as Mr. 
 Mill says, what we have in our concept, notion, or knowledge of 
 it; that to state this is to form analytic judgments; that to be 
 liable to remain alive is no more an essential attribute of the genus 
 man, as Mr. Mill supposes it is, than to be liable to die,—life than 
 death; that the predication of the latter liability is as com¬ 
 pletely an analytic judgment as the predication of the former is, 
 whether Mr. Mill can find any case in which it is a synthetic 
 ' judgment’ or not. And as to speaking (p. 358) of this liability 
 to die, and of the other human attributes, which are the subject of 
 Treatises on human nature, as things of which we know nothing,— 
 things * not in our concept’ or knowledge of man, is this not a 
 mockery ? and is it not a mockery, also, to speak of essential attri- 
 
 E 
 
66 
 
 JUDGMENT. 
 
 butes,—those attributes of a thing ‘ without which it cannot be/ 
 ‘ which it cannot lose without ceasing to be/ in the text (ibid.) as 
 a useful distinction, and in the footnote as an ‘ extremely vulgar’ 
 one ? Can Mr. Mill be nothing but a farceur ? 
 
 (c.) Mr. Mill supposes that a thing cannot be analysed, to any 
 extent , into its component parts, unless it is analysed into all of 
 them; and therefore supposes that when Hamilton describes a 
 definition as an analysis of a concept into its component parts, this 
 must mean into all its parts. How, every reader is here competent 
 to see that this is not the fact. It is clearly incorrect to say, that 
 because the analysis of a conception is described as being into its 
 component parts, this means into all its component parts. In such 
 phrases, the words, ‘ into its component parts/ denote ‘ into any of 
 them that the case requires/ not necessarily into all of them. If 
 this opposite sense were intended, it would be requisite to insert 
 the word ‘ all/ and speak of ( all its component parts/ I shall not 
 follow Mr. Mill into the erroneous consequences which he draws 
 from this obvious misrepresentation, but merely remark how neces¬ 
 sary it is for us to bear in mind the task he has set himself when 
 we read such an attempt as this is to mislead his readers. It 
 would, I must repeat it, hardly be believed, prior to an examination 
 of his volume, how much care he has bestowed upon concealing the 
 real statements he is making, and upon giving an air of philoso¬ 
 phical precision to a mere specious appearance. To say that he is 
 doing so unintentionally, and that he knows no better, seems a 
 judgment unnecessarily severe. Those who know him more inti¬ 
 mately it may be permitted to say this. To me—to most of us—it 
 is not permissible. 
 
 We thus not only see clearly how little—say rather how com¬ 
 pletely nothing—these three arguments have done towards making 
 it appear that the predicate’s being Part of its subject ignores the 
 synthetic processes of learning and believing, or ignores the dis¬ 
 tinction between these processes and analytic judgments; but we 
 see, also, how much additional evidence, had any been needed, the 
 introduction of three such arguments affords, that Mr. Mill was 
 not in earnest when he propounded them, or the proposition they 
 were to support. 
 
 This brings us to the end of the four Minor Issues raised in 
 this chapter for the purpose of making it clear to us that, in Logic, 
 
JUDGMENT . 
 
 67 
 
 swiftness is not part of the swift boat; and we have seen how 
 childishly groundless they all are. 
 
 The only other proposition of Hamilton’s here supposed to be 
 disputed is one which, Mr. Mill admits, does not affect the question 
 as to the Whole and Part in Logic. It is this : When we say that 
 A is the father of B, and that B is the son of A, Hamilton says 
 that these are correlative statements; that there is here, really and 
 ultimately, hut one meaning, stated in two different ways; that 
 'primd facie there appear two meanings, involving one another, in¬ 
 somuch that if either is true the other is so, i.e., we may reciprocally 
 and necessarily infer them from one another, hut that there never¬ 
 theless, or rather on this very account, is only one meaning—only 
 one matter of fact and thought; that when we say A is the father 
 of B, our uppermost thought may be to state either that this 
 relation subsists upon A’s part towards B, or that it does not exist 
 upon B’s part towards A, in which latter case there subsists a 
 totally different relation; but that either statement so necessarily 
 implies the other, that to state the one is to state the other. 
 Hamilton adds, moreover, that we interpret the one correlative 
 term by means of the other,—neither having any meaning at all 
 until so interpreted. 
 
 This is the principle (that of correlatives and correlation) which 
 Hamilton has explained at some length with reference to Extension 
 and Comprehension in Logic (see quotation, p. 360, with Mr. Mill’s 
 own summary at the top of p. 362), and which we find that Mr. 
 Mill, as usual, affects to dispute. But does he indeed dispute it ? 
 He does not. It will be found that he simply echoes every state¬ 
 ment which Hamilton made, with one infinitesimal exception, 
 endeavouring, nevertheless, all the time, here as everywhere else, to 
 make it appear that he differs from Hamilton toto ccelo. He says 
 that the one meaning implies the other, just as a figure with three 
 sides implies a figure with three angles ; that as far as the meaning, 
 therefore, is concerned, there is no difference; that there being a 
 son as well as a father, or three sides as well as three angles, or a 
 Whole in Comprehension as well as a Whole in Extension, must 
 not lead us to suppose that there are two distinct matters of fact or 
 of thought that we may infer from one another; for it is not cor¬ 
 rect English, according to Mr. Mill, to say that we can, from our 
 having 144 apples, infer that we have what makes 12 X 12, or that 
 
68 
 
 JUDGMENT. 
 
 we can infer three angles from three sides, or a son from a father, 
 or, in short, anything from the mere existence of that with which it 
 is a priori connected. There is, strictly speaking, in such cases no 
 inference; no new fact not already known, or, as Mr. Mill prefers 
 to call it, not already ‘ in the concept;’ the fact of three angles 
 and the fact of three sides being only apparently, and primd facie, 
 two facts, but really and ultimately one and the same fact written 
 in two different ways. That the fact in Extension ‘ follows ’ (p. 362) 
 wherever the fact in Comprehension exists, is a point on which Mr. 
 Mill agrees with Hamilton; and he also agrees with him (p. 363) 
 that the fact in Comprehension exists in every proposition which 
 has a general notion for its predicate. But Mr. Mill’s position here 
 against Hamilton is, that this ‘ following’ is not a following at all; 
 that the second assertion is not a conclusion from, but a mere 
 repetition of the first; for what is the second statement if we leave 
 out of it all reference to the first ? It can then only mean that we 
 have ascertained the one fact without the other. How, do we 
 assert this ? or, would it be true ? etc., etc. 
 
 We see, then, that there is not a shadow of difference here be¬ 
 tween Mr. Mill and Hamilton except the minute point as to whether 
 it is or is not correct English to speak of the ‘ followings’ in 
 Geometry as ‘ inferences’ and ‘ conclusions,’—as ‘ reciprocally in¬ 
 ferrible from one another;’ for whatever is in this point correct in 
 Geometry, is correct in Logic also, and in all other a priori science. 
 This, it will be admitted, is a curious mode of disputing and dis¬ 
 proving Hamilton’s statement, that Comprehension and Extension 
 are, in Logic, correlative terms, and have in them, and in their 
 relation to one another, all the peculiarities of such terms. Does 
 not a disproof of this kind look uncommonly like what in his own 
 choice phraseology Mr. Mill would call * a superfetation’ of dis¬ 
 content ? 
 
 He here, also, obtrudes upon us the four following statements : 
 —(1.) Those who use Conversion in Logic ‘ have no concern with’ 
 the extent or quantity of the Predicate. ‘ When I say, All men 
 ‘ are bipeds, what has my assertion to do with the class biped as to 
 ‘ its Extension ? Have I any concern with the remainder of the 
 ‘ class after man is subtracted from it ? Am I necessarily aware 
 ‘ even whether there is any remainder at all?’ (p. 363.) (2.) When 
 
 two modes of proof are possible in Geometry, Arithmetic, Logic, or 
 
JUDGMENT. 
 
 69 
 
 any other a priori science, one of them being sufficient for all 
 practical purposes, every attempt to bring the other into notice is 
 to be severely condemned, never taken account of nor alluded to, 
 except under the name of a superfluity, or, as he more elegantly 
 expresses such superfluities,—a superfetation upon the science (a 
 term here apparently * obtruded’ as his interpretation of our time- 
 honoured ‘ mare’s nest’), which superfluities, however, he admits, 
 more suo, to be also, as in this case, ‘ a valuable addition ,’ and not 
 such bad things after all. ‘ Sir W. Hamilton’s distinction between 
 ‘ Seasoning in Comprehension and Reasoning in Extension will be 
 ‘ found, as we shall see hereafter, to be a mere superfetation on 
 ‘ Logic’ (p. 364). ‘ According to the very different view I myself 
 ‘ take of Formal Logic (what is commonly called ‘‘Logic”), this 
 ‘ doctrine (Sir W. Hamilton’s second mode of Reasoning) might 
 ‘ still be a valuable addition 'to it, . . . an improvement on the 
 ‘ common form ; and I am not disposed to deny, that for occasional 
 ‘ use, and for purposes of illustration, it is so,’ etc., etc. (pp. 438-9). 
 (3.) Man is quite as essentially a quadruped, or even a centipede, 
 as he is a biped. Mr. Mill warns us of ‘ the impropriety of saying 
 ‘ that the notion man contains the predicate two-legged, when 
 ‘ that attribute is evidently not part of the signification of the 
 ‘ word’ (p. 361). And (4.) Although the boundless productive Power 
 employed in Nature determines the number of animal species that 
 are contained under the conception Fish, this boundless produc¬ 
 tive Power does not determine the number of attributes which are 
 contained in any one individual fish, or in any one species belonging 
 to that general conception. The number of these attributes de ¬ 
 pends, we are told, on something else, but on what it depends does 
 not emerge (see last paragraph of the chapter, p. 364). Some of 
 these deviations from common sense, these minor peculiarities of 
 doctrine in Mr. Mill’s view of Logic, deserve notice from their 
 connexion with some principal part of our author’s doctrine, others 
 chiefly as throwing light upon the character of his mind. But none 
 of them require to have their waggery exposed. 
 
 We have now seen, not only that common sense is entirely 
 against Mr. Mill upon the main issue of this chapter, the predicate 
 in each affirmative judgment being necessarily, in all cases, part of 
 the subject, but that upon each of the four minor issues it is against 
 him also. We have seen that there is no self-contradiction be- 
 
70 
 
 JUDGMENT. 
 
 tween Hamilton’s two statements of what judgment is—that there 
 is no evil in being obliged to judge of things as we know them, in¬ 
 stead of as we do not know them,— i.e., according to our conceptions 
 of them—that we can predicate individuals of one another quite as 
 well as classes, and that the predicate, being part of the subject, does 
 not ignore the synthetic process of acquiring information, or its 
 difference from the analytic process which in Logic is called 'judg¬ 
 ment.’ We have thus chased Jack from one of these four en¬ 
 chanted castles to another, in each of which, if we believed him, he 
 was killing the Giant. But it is now time to rescue Mr. John S. 
 Mill from the self-degradation entailed upon him by this portion 
 of his Pantomime, and to explain that, in other passages of the self¬ 
 same chapter, he steps before the scenes, and in a few grave and 
 hurried words, audible only to the few, assures his puzzled friends 
 that it is all fun—that he, as well as every one else, admits that 
 the attributes of things are actually parts of the things, and our 
 conceptions of the attributes actually parts of our conceptions of 
 the things. The following quotations will suffice :— 
 
 At p. 343, he says he approves of the statement that in a 
 Judgment there are at least two parts in our concept or mental re¬ 
 presentation or knowledge of the subject, viz., the predicate itself 
 on the one hand, and the subject, minus the predicate, on the other. 
 This is admitting that the predicate is part of the subject. ‘ To 
 ‘ judge is to recognise whether two concepts, two things, or a con- 
 ‘ cept and a thing, are capable of co-existing as parts of the same 
 ‘ mental representation.’ If both are parts of it, one of them, of 
 course, is part of it. 
 
 At p. 346, 'A concept is a part of that mental representation.’ 
 
 At p. 349, ‘ How a concept, that is, a bundle of attributes, may 
 ‘ be a part of another concept, and may be part of our mental image 
 ‘ of an individual object.’ 
 
 At p. 352, ‘ When concepts have been formed, and we subse- 
 ‘ quently proceed to analyse them, then we form judgments which 
 ‘ recognise one concept as a whole of which another is a part.’ 
 
 At p. 355, ‘ Analytical judgments unfold the contents (and 
 ‘ parts) of a concept, affirming explicitly of a class, attributes which 
 ‘ were already part of the corresponding concept.’ 
 
 At p. 358, ‘ Instead of saying that the attributes composing the 
 ‘ concept of the predicate are part of those which compose the con- 
 
JUDGMENT. 
 
 71 
 
 ‘ cept of the subject, we ought to say, they are either a part or are 
 ‘ invariably conjoined with them, not in our conception but in 
 ‘ fact/ The things which compose anything are parts of it, and 
 what is part in fact is part also in our concept of the thing, except 
 when our concept and the thing do not correspond, in which case 
 we do not know what is or is not in fact. 
 
 Ibid. ‘ Propositions in which the concept of the predicate is part 
 ‘ of the concept of the subject, are a kind of Identical propositions ; 
 ‘ they convey no information’ (to the person previously acquainted 
 with the facts they state, but to those only who are previously 
 unacquainted with these facts, and who could not therefore ever 
 form these judgments). 
 
 I have now shown both that the predicate, in every affirmative 
 judgment, is part—always part—of the subject, and also that Mr. 
 Mill is aware it is so,—and acknowledges that it is so. 
 
SECTION III. 
 
 CHAPTEE XIX.—REASONING. 
 
 Mr. Mill announces, in the first page of this chapter, that the 
 proposition which he is now going to controvert is, that 4 Seasoning 
 is the comparison of two notions by means of a third.’ On the 
 second page, however, he shifts his ground, and announces that the 
 proposition he is about to assail is not this, but that ‘Seasoning 
 is a mode of ascertaining that one notion is a part of another.’ 
 This real want of philosophical precision is an ordinary defect 
 in his pages. 
 
 We must assume that he proposes to dispute both points. He 
 means, that Seasoning is neither of these things—neither two con¬ 
 ceptions (of things) compared by means of a third conception, nor 
 one conception ascertained to be a part of another. 
 
 He is here canvassing, it would seem unconsciously, again, but 
 on new grounds, the proposition denied also, and afterwards assented 
 to, in his 18th chapter, viz., that the predicate is part of the subject; 
 in other words, that what is true of anything is a logical part of that 
 thing,— that swiftness, for instance, is not conjoined with a swift 
 boat, but is a logical part of it, without which a swift boat could not 
 exist at all. This return to his former blunder, from which he had 
 of himself withdrawn, is all the consistency we need ever expect to 
 find in him, but is here excusable in one not accustomed to these 
 discussions, inasmuch as reasoning or inference is, in point of fact, a 
 kind of judgment, although it is with Seasoning alone that he is 
 nominally occupied in this chapter. Shall we, therefore, call the 
 relapse an oversight ? Be it so. In this case I shall make no 
 objection. Yet these relapses are constantly recurring. 
 
 The arguments here employed are these:—1. It is not possible 
 that we should need to find out—it is not possible that we should 
 not know intuitively—that one conception is part of another, if it 
 really is so. (This, which is the second point mentioned by Mr. 
 
REASONING. 
 
 73 
 
 Mill, he discusses first.) And 2. If we do not so know it, it is not 
 possible that a third conception should teach a learner more about 
 any two conceptions than he previously knew without this third 
 one. From these two supposed impossibilities he would have us 
 infer that, when we describe the principle of Eeasoning, as all 
 Logicians do describe it, to be JS T ota notce nota est rei ipsius , the 
 mark of the mark is the mark of the thing marked, or Prcedicatum 
 prcedicati est etiam prcedicatum subjecti , we must not understand 
 this to mean, as we all do, the principle that the part of the part is 
 the part of the whole ; but to mean, according to Mj^ Mill’s words, 
 that that which is conjoined with something that is conjoined with 
 an object, is also itself conjoined with the object; or, as we should 
 prefer to express the same idea, that the appendage of an appendage 
 is the appendage of the object which has the appendage. 
 
 The two points now before us may be thus otherwise stated:— 
 The doctrine of all Logicians, and of Hamilton among the rest, 
 is that, in certain cases, we teach or learn, as an inference, not 
 as a fact of which we have intuitive knowledge, that one notion 
 is part of another (i.e., is true of another); and that we, in such 
 cases, teach or learn this previously unknown relation through a 
 comparison of the two notions with a third. Mr. Mill, on the con¬ 
 trary, denies both propositions in all cases. He holds that if we, 
 as learners, have two conceptions to deal with, we cannot fail to see 
 intuitively whether either is a logical part of (i.e., is true of) the 
 other or not; and that if we do fail to see this intuitively, no third 
 conception or increase of knowledge can enable us to learn it, or 
 throw any further light upon the relation for us. 
 
 1. Let us take these two objections in the order in which Mr. Mill 
 discusses them. He first objects (p. 366)—How is it possible that 
 one notion should be part of another notion, i.e., be involved in 
 another notion, and we not know it ? I answer that this often hap¬ 
 pens. It happens obviously in the case of every one of us who does 
 not himself possess these conceptions—who does not himself possess 
 all possible human knowledge. How can any individual perceive 
 the relations of two conceptions to one another, when he is unac¬ 
 quainted with the conceptions themselves, or with either of them ? 
 How can I know that the conception which symbolizes swiftness is 
 part of the conception which symbolizes another person’s boat, if I 
 have neither of these conceptions, or only one of them, in my own 
 mind, however true it may be that there are both these conceptions ? 
 
74 
 
 REASONING. 
 
 The mere fact that these conceptions exist, does not make them 
 mine. This, I suppose, will be readily granted by Mr. Mill, or 
 rather by the defenders of Mr. Mill’s seriousness. The same thing, 
 however, does happen in many cases even where we have but one 
 of the conceptions in the same mind, unless, with Mr. Mill, we hold 
 the quaint theory, that the individual’s knowledge of things does not 
 extend beyond the knowledge of which he is at each moment 
 conscious. There are various notions necessarily involved in the 
 notion of a triangle, for instance, which we do not think of or even 
 know of, when we entertain the notion of a triangle; for ‘ the 
 notion’ of a triangle is, of course, not an idiot’s notion of it, nor this 
 or that person’s notion of it, but the utmost that is known or even 
 knowable to mankind about it. It is frivolous to deny that there 
 are many conceptions here involved in, and parts of, and necessarily 
 conjoined with other parts of, man’s knowledge of the triangle— 
 ay, and conceptions of self-evident relations, of which conceptions, 
 when we are conscious of the conception of a triangle, we are wholly 
 unconscious,—whether it be that we do not know them at all, or 
 merely do not think of them ; the conception, for instance, that it is 
 always the half of a parallelogram diagonally bisected. But even 
 when we are conscious of both the conceptions to be compared, it 
 frequently happens that the one’s being part of the other, i.e., true of 
 the other, is not self-evident, and may even be long unknown. This 
 is clearly the case when one of the notions is in one person’s mind, 
 and the other in another person’s mind at the same time. Or, when 
 both of the notions are in the same mind at different points of time 
 —one at one time and one at another, it is clearly possible that the 
 one may be true of the other, i.e., be a logical part of it without 
 our being aware of it. The only question, therefore, that remains, or 
 that can arise, is this, How is it possible that one notion should be 
 part of another notion, and we not know it, when they are both 
 present to the same mind at the same, or nearly the same, instant ? 
 How, I here answer that this is perfectly possible, and is a fact 
 familiar to all of us. The notion which is the whole, and the 
 notion which is the part of it— i.e., which is true of the whole— 
 are both of them very frequently in the mind of the same person 
 at the same moment; and the person is, moreover, informed of the 
 fact that the two notions are in this relation to each other, yet he 
 cannot discern that it is so until it is proved to him. To perceive 
 this relation, says Mr. Mill, if it exists, nothing surely can be 
 
REASONING. 
 
 75 
 
 necessary but to fix the attention on the two notions. Not at all. 
 Mr. Mill well knows that this is not so (see p. 353). The three 
 angles of a triangle constitute one notion, a logical or metaphysical 
 whole. One of their attributes, and therefore one of their logical 
 or metaphysical parts—one of the things true of them—is the 
 being equal to two right angles. This is here the second notion. 
 But what amount of mere attention bestowed upon these two 
 notions alone (the being equal to two right angles, and the being 
 the three angles of a triangle) would ever make us perceive their 
 relation to one another,—would ever make us perceive that the 
 one was a part or attribute of the other, or a mark of the other, or, 
 in Mr. Mill’s phrase, something conjoined with the other parts of 
 the other ? If we were to stare at the notion of the three angles 
 in a triangle till doomsday, and to stare also till doomsday at our 
 notion of a thing’s being equal to two right angles, without our 
 having any other item of thought or conception to compare them 
 with, doomsday would arrive without our discovering that the 
 being equal to two right angles was a part of the three angles in 
 question, or even that it was a mere unessential appendage to them. 
 How is this possible ? he asks. How is it possible that the relation 
 of these two notions to each other, as Whole and Part in Logic,— 
 as being one of them true of the other—should not be self-evident, 
 if it really exists ? Our notion or knowledge on any subject con¬ 
 sists of notions as its parts, and is it not self-evident, he asks, if the 
 thing is true at all, that one of the constituent parts in our know¬ 
 ledge of the three angles belonging to a triangle is that they are 
 equal to two right angles ? Indeed, Mr. Mill, it is not. Even 
 when we are told that there is this relation between these notions, 
 it is not self- evident. To perceive that the one conception is part 
 of the other, ‘ nothing surely can be necessary,’ reiterates Mr. Mill, 
 ‘ but to fix our attention upon them. We cannot surely concen- 
 ‘ trate our consciousness on two ideas in our own mind without 
 ‘ knowing with certainty whether one of them as a (logical) Whole 
 ‘ includes the other as a (logical) Part;’ i.e., whether one of them is 
 true of the other (p. 366). Either the relation is not true, we are 
 told, or, if it is, it is self-evident! Eor what class of readers, I 
 again ask, has Mr. Mill written such stuff as this? If any one 
 can see common sense in it, no self-contradiction and no impossi¬ 
 bility in any theory of consciousness need ever stagger him. There 
 is no such thing as a reduction to absurdity if this is not one. Some 
 
76 
 
 REASONING. 
 
 judgments are self-evident. That the whole is greater than its 
 part, is so. That the part of the part is a part of the Whole, is so, 
 both in Physics and Metaphysics. That 2 and 2 are 4, is so. But 
 not, that 12x12 = 144; not, that the three angles of a triangle are 
 equal to two right angles ; not, that the circumference and diameter 
 of a circle are to one another as 3 and a fraction are to 1. Nobody 
 calls it self-evident that in any of these cases the one conception is 
 true of the other, or a part of the other, or involved in it, or a 
 mark of it, or conjoined with the other parts of it, however simul¬ 
 taneously we may be conscious of the two conceptions. Where did 
 Mr. Mill learn that such things are self-evident ? Are we to be¬ 
 lieve that he was in earnest when he wrote this ? and that it would 
 be overrating his understanding to say that he knew better ? 4 My 
 newly-invented Introspective Method is here in its place.’ It 
 would be well then, Mr. Mill, if you employed it. 
 
 2. His next objection is, that if we have a knowledge, however 
 imperfect and personal, of two totally different facts, and the know¬ 
 ledge of neither is sufficient to show us whether either is true of the 
 other, it is impossible that any further knowledge—that our know¬ 
 ledge of any conceivable third fact, should show us this. Giant¬ 
 killing gone mad, is what is here suggested to us. Mr. John Mill’s 
 words are as follows :— 4 Moreover, if it were really the case that 
 4 we can compare two notions, and fail to discover whether one of 
 4 them is a part of the other, it is impossible to understand how we 
 4 could be enabled to accomplish this by comparing each of them 
 4 with a third ;’ i.e., by knowing anything more about them ! (p. 366). 
 He thus magnanimously allows us to suppose, arguments causa, that 
 the relation of Part and Whole between the two conceptions can 
 exist without being self-evident; he allows us to suppose that it is 
 not self-evident that the three angles of a triangle are not equal to 
 two right angles ; in other words, that the being equal to two right 
 angles is not, in a self-evident manner, part of our knowledge of 
 the three angles of a triangle ; and then asks, If this sort of tiling is 
 not self-evident, how can a third conception—how can any further 
 knowledge, in any case, help us to see that the one of these concep¬ 
 tions is an attribute, or part of the other ? Would not the new 
 relations subsisting between any middle term and the two extremes 
 be necessarily as far from self-evident as the old relation between 
 the extremes themselves ? I answer, not necessarily. Do we not, 
 he insists, see the enormous inconsistency of supposing that they 
 
REASONING. 
 
 77 
 
 would not? I answer, No. Assuredly they would often be so, 
 and often are so. These relations of the third term very often 
 require proof; as often as not. But what of that ? Self-evident 
 propositions, it is true, require no proof,—not even self-evident 
 proof. But propositions not self-evident always require proof, and 
 this proof (of one notion being part of another) is sometimes self- 
 evident, and sometimes not. In Euclid’s 1st Prop, of the First 
 Book, the proof is entirely self-evident (the very possibility which 
 Mr. Mill here questions). In the 2d, one of the middle term’s 
 relations is self-evident, and one proved. In the 5th, both its rela¬ 
 tions are proved. In many cases, it is not one middle term, but 
 several, whose relations have to be considered, as in the ratio of the 
 circumference to its diameter; and in all cases, if we have not self- 
 evident proof at once, we go back until we find it. So that, as far 
 as all the proofs in Geometry, and all other a priori proofs are con¬ 
 cerned, we have, for a proposition which is not self-evident, ulti¬ 
 mately and really no other proof at all but self-evident proof. 
 Thus, although Mr. Mill seems to limit his assertion to self-evident 
 premisses only, it necessarily extends, without his consent, to all 
 a priori premisses; and how does he like its appearance then ? 
 Can he mean that a middle or third term ( i.e ., increased knowledge) 
 never enables us to see that one extreme is part of the other, if we 
 do not see this at once ? 
 
 There are thus here two cases to be considered of a conclusion 
 not self-evident,—one in which the premisses presented by the third 
 term are self-evident, and one in which they are not. Mr. Mill, 
 however, as I say, seems, useless though it be, to limit his assertion 
 to the former case. He seems to speak only of the immediate pre¬ 
 misses, and to admit that where these require proof, i.e., are not self- 
 evident, the third term, whose relations they state, is of use, and 
 seems to hold that it is only when the premisses are self-evident 
 that the third term can be of no use. But does he not see that, 
 even if it is of no other use, this third term is then of use to show 
 this fact ? It is of use to show that the relations of the Extremes 
 with one and the same third term are self-evident. This additional 
 knowledge, he will admit, cannot possibly be discerned without the 
 aid of the third term. For how could its relations be discerned 
 where itself was not ? and the relations of the extremes cannot, ex 
 hy'pothesi, be discerned by themselves. The use, then, of which a 
 third term can be in enabling us to discern that one notion is true 
 
78 
 
 REASONING. 
 
 of another notion (or is part of it) is this—It extends our know¬ 
 ledge or notion of each extreme. It exhibits each intuitively, in 
 other relations beside that unknown one, in which they stand to one 
 another; and this extended notion or extended knowledge of the 
 two extremes contains in it the required knowledge, and we thus 
 perceive also intuitively one extreme to be part of (or true of) the 
 other extreme. 
 
 Mr. Mill asks, But how is this possible, that the conclusion 
 should not be from the first self-evident, and yet that the premisses 
 should be so ? How is it possible that one portion of our knowledge 
 ^should be self-evident, and another not ? ‘ The one truth must be 
 
 as much a matter of direct consciousness as the other’ (p. 369). 
 Now, where, I again ask, are we to look for a reduction to absurdity 
 if this is not one ? Who that accepts such a theory as this need 
 ever be staggered afterwards by any self-contradiction or impossi¬ 
 bility that may come in his way, either in a theory of self-conscious¬ 
 ness, or in a theory of Beasoning, or in any other sort of theory 
 whatever? 1 . How is it possible that one portion of our knowledge 
 should be self-evident , and another not 1 I answer, because our know¬ 
 ledge on any one point may be self-evident to-day, although it was 
 not so yesterday. That alone is enough to break the rule. Besides, 
 would it not be something still more extraordinary that our know¬ 
 ledge should be all self-evident at the same time, or all non-self- 
 evident at the same time, alternately; or that it should be all 
 permanently self-evident, or all permanently requiring proof ? 
 2. ‘ The one truth must be as much a matter of direct consciousness as 
 the other! In one sense this is true. In one sense it is not. In 
 the sense of the foregoing question it is not true. It is not at all 
 necessary that the conclusion that requires proof must also have 
 proof that requires proof. Am I unjust to Mr. Mill in saying that 
 he knows it is not ? But if what he intends to express is that self- 
 evident premisses make a self-evident conclusion, I answer, True. 
 But not to those unacquainted with the self-evident premisses ; not 
 to each mind until the moment in which each mind perceives the 
 premisses to be self-evident; not until our knowledge has extended 
 to the new relations presented by or created by the third term. 
 This combination with, or necessity for, premisses, or further know¬ 
 ledge of some kind, constitutes the whole difference between a self- 
 evident proposition and one that is not so. The entanglement here 
 contrived by Mr. Mill, for I cannot agree with his admirers that he 
 
REASONING. 
 
 79 
 
 is the victim of his own entanglement, consists in his affecting to 
 think that self-evident premisses do nothing for us ; that we know 
 as much without them as we know with them, and this merely 
 because there is no more stated in the conclusion than in the pre¬ 
 misses ; a mistake, however, into which Mr. Mill will find it possible 
 to decoy very few of his readers. One is only curious to know for 
 what class of them he supplies the mental pabulum of which this 
 is a specimen. 
 
 I re-state the whole matter thus :—The assertion of Logicians 
 upon this point, as opposed by Mr. Mill, he describes as this : ‘ A, 
 B, and C are three concepts, of ‘ which we are supposed to know that 
 ‘ A is a part of B and B of C, but until we put these two pro- 
 ‘ positions together (i.e., until we view them simultaneously), we do 
 ‘ not know that A is a part of C’ (p. 366). In other words, we do 
 not discern that A is a logical part of C until the moment in 
 which we first have the simultaneous knowledge of their relations, 
 in this respect, to B. As soon, however, as we can put the two pre¬ 
 misses together, which is at the very instant and by the very act in 
 which we discern the second premiss, several things become at once 
 self-evident, one of which is that A is true of C,—that the one notion 
 is a part of the other. This simultaneous self-evidence of the con¬ 
 clusion and the premisses is a correct statement of what Hamilton 
 and all the rest of the Logical World assert upon this point. It is 
 not self-evident that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two 
 right angles. But we can be made to perceive this by an extension 
 of our knowledge,—by any arrangement whatever which makes 
 us perceive intuitively that something else, here B (a middle term), 
 is true of these three angles, and has also, as true of it, the being 
 equal to two right angles,—a compound discovery, simultaneously 
 with which we are enabled to discern the relation in question. 
 
 Mr. Mill here asks, How can one know the premisses without at 
 the same time knowing the conclusion ? The answer is, We cannot. 
 Ho one says we can. Again he asks, How can the premisses be 
 self-evident without this or that person knowing them to be so ? 
 Answer—In several ways. A person may not yet have ever heard 
 of them. His intellect may be incapable of ever understanding them 
 at all, or of understanding them with his present limited knowledge, 
 or at his present early age. But no one denies that, in whatever 
 case the premisses are self-evident, the conclusion is so, or that as 
 soon as they are known to be so, the conclusion is known to be so. 
 
80 
 
 REASONING. 
 
 Things are often self-evident without our knowing that they are 
 so,—self-evident to one person without being so to another. Mr. 
 Mill returns to the charge somewhat exasperated. He says, You 
 are supposed to see intuitively that A is a part of B, and also to 
 see intuitively that B is part of C. How on earth then, he con¬ 
 tinues, could you help seeing equally intuitively from the beginning 
 that A was part of C ? The answer to this is, Because we did not 
 see the premisses intuitively from the beginning,—we did not see 
 them at all. If we had, we should have seen intuitively from the 
 beginning that A was part of C. When a person first hears the 
 proposition, he has less knowledge of its extremes than he has after 
 having had his attention directed to the premisses. Is there any¬ 
 thing wonderful, therefore, in his finding it self-evident to him in 
 the one case and not in the other ?—in his finding that, although 
 the conclusion’s being capable of being self-evident does not make 
 it self-evident what the premisses are, yet the premisses’ being self- 
 evident makes the conclusion so ? 
 
 We see that there merely being self-evident premisses is not 
 enough. We must be acquainted with them. We must have our 
 attention drawn to them. We must have heard of them. The 
 mere fact of there being such premisses does not render a proposi¬ 
 tion self-evident to us until we are acquainted with them. What 
 was previously not self-evident then becomes so. Mr. Mill denies 
 this. He says that the mere fact of there being self-evident pre¬ 
 misses is enough, whether we have ever heard of them or not! 
 
 If Mr. Mill seeks to evade this self-contradiction, and takes 
 refuge in saying, as some people sometimes do, that he did not 
 mean what he said; that he did not mean we could find the pro¬ 
 position self-evident without a previous knowledge of the self- 
 evident premisses, as his words would lead us to suppose, but 
 merely that, when we know both, we must know the proposition 
 before we know the premisses,—we must know that A is part of C 
 before we can possibly know that ‘ A and something more’ is part 
 of C,—even if there is this retreat from the first position, his theory 
 may be still chased from point to point, unable to make a stand any 
 where. If it escapes, it is only out of one self-contradiction into 
 another. There is no £ Before’ or ‘ After’ here for him to escape into. 
 The conclusion and the premisses become simultaneously, not suc¬ 
 cessively, self-evident. The only priority here capable of being 
 recognised is priority of attention ; and the first fact to which our 
 
REASONING. 
 
 81 
 
 attention is called, while we are in the act of grasping the pre¬ 
 misses, is the relation we are endeavouring to prove,—not that B 
 must have some other parts, or one other part, or two in it beside 
 A, as Mr. Mill supposes, but that A is part of C. 
 
 Mr. Mill explains himself as follows. He thus describes what 
 he regards as the great obstacle to our employing a third term in 
 Logic, or some additional information, for the purpose, as we do, 
 of showing that one portion of our knowledge is part of another 
 portion of it. ‘We have perceived B in C intuitively, by direct 
 ‘ comparison. But what is B ? By supposition it is, and is per- 
 £ ceived to be, A and something more. We have, therefore, by 
 ‘ direct intuition, perceived that A and something more is a part 
 f of C, without perceiving that A is a part of C. Surely there is 
 ‘ here a great psychological difficulty to be got over’ (pp. 366-7). 
 The objection here made to the use of premisses and a third concep¬ 
 tion, or third term, in Logic, is that, if there are such things, they 
 introduce the absurdity that, while we profess to see the premisses 
 before the conclusion, we really, according to our process, and in 
 spite of ourselves, see the conclusion before the premisses. For we 
 must, he tells us, be able to discern that A is true of C before we 
 can possibly discern that A and something more is so; and this 
 absurdity resulting from it shows our process to be wrong. 
 
 Now, to say that we know A and something more to be true of 
 C before we know A alone to be so, is to say that the proposition is 
 not instantly self-evident in the two premisses, as Mr. Mill him¬ 
 self admits it to be at page 362 ; and this is quite as preposterous 
 as the previous statement, that the premisses from the first are self- 
 evident in the conclusion, or that the conclusion, which is not self- 
 evident at a given time, or to a given person, can become self- 
 evident then, and to him, without further knowledge, i.e., without 
 premisses. Thus, even if we here take it for granted, with Mr. Mill, 
 that we perceive B to be A and something more quite as soon as 
 we can perceive it to be so—quite as soon as we perceive A itself to 
 be part of B, how can it be said, except in joke, that we can per¬ 
 ceive A and something more to be part of C before we can perceive 
 A to be so ? There is here, as I have said, no priority of self¬ 
 evidence, but of attention only. As soon as the premisses are 
 discerned, several facts are at once rendered capable of being intui¬ 
 tively perceived. One of these is the proposition for which we are 
 on the look-out, viz., that A is part of C ; and another, one of the 
 
 F 
 
82 
 
 REASONING. 
 
 premisses, viz., that A is a part of B. But although one of these 
 two facts, viz., the proposition proved, is formally stated after the 
 proof, it is clearly not true to say that it is not so soon perceivable 
 as the other; and if this is true of A’s being part of B, a fortiori 
 it is true of its converse, not then yet thought of at all, viz., B’s being 
 A and something more. Jack is here in the Giant’s clutches, 
 writhing and gasping to an extent which makes one glad to know 
 that the whole thing is only a pantomime of Jack’s own getting 
 up, and the gasping and writhing all histrionic. 
 
 On the point here discussed, I have pointed out the three fol¬ 
 lowing principles in contradiction of Mr. Mill:—1. It is not true 
 that self-evident premisses are inconsistent with anon-self-evident 
 conclusion; or, in other words, it is not inconsistent that a pro¬ 
 position which without further knowledge cannot be perceived 
 intuitively, should, with further knowledge, be so perceived. 
 2. It is not until such time as we become acquainted with the pre¬ 
 misses that self-evident premisses necessitate a self-evident con¬ 
 clusion. 3. It is at the same moment, neither before nor after, 
 and by the same act, that the facts of the conclusion and the facts 
 of the premisses become capable of being perceived intuitively by 
 each person, although it is natural that we should speak of, as fol¬ 
 lowing and inferred, the proposition, without which we could have 
 known the others, but which, without the others, we never could 
 have known. As Mr. Mill is well aware, there never was such a 
 thing as a Conceptualist School, which he writes so much about, 
 and employs as a bugbear in every chapter for those unacquainted 
 with these subjects; but even if there had been, there is not here 
 the smallest difficulty, ‘ psychological’ or otherwise, for such a 
 school ‘ to have been blind to.’ His must be a thick head, indeed, 
 who finds a puzzle here, or anything strange here; and I decline 
 thus to estimate Mr. Mill’s, even at his own instance, however much 
 or justly he may have himself thus estimated the understandings 
 of the Bationalist, i.e ., Materialist, School, for whom he has written. 
 We find here one of those numberless propositions in which he states, 
 throughout his book, what he knows is ‘ psychologically’ false, and 
 what he is well aware everybody else knows to be so. Is it to 
 be supposed for an instant that Mr. Mill would do this otherwise 
 than in jest? Surely not. Surely there is, in his having done it 
 at all, a considerable ‘ psychological’ difficulty to be accounted for, 
 — considerable enough, in all conscience, without any necessity for 
 
REASONING . 
 
 83 
 
 supposing one still greater,—a difficulty to be accounted for to 
 which critics of the Eationalist School, and, indeed, of other schools 
 also, have been surprisingly blind. 
 
 In allusion to the foregoing principles, Mr. Mill says he does 
 not understand what Logicians say in reply to what thus puzzles 
 him. He further owns, in rather a clumsy imitation of Hume’s most 
 playful mood, that he does not here try to understand them; that 
 instead of trying to do this, he will imagine what ‘ they might say,’ 
 and reply in sport to their imaginary explanations ; acknowledging, 
 it would seem, in an unguarded moment, that what he calls their 
 absurdity is only an ‘ apparent absurdity’ (p. 365). He then sug¬ 
 gests two of these imaginary explanations, and tells us that he 
 found it very difficult, indeed, ‘ to invent’ these two, and that even 
 these any blockhead could overthrow. ‘ It is a great deal easier to 
 refute these arguments than it was to discover them.’ We need 
 not follow little Jack through the mazes of the little wood into 
 which he here enters. Suffice it to say, that he endeavours to con¬ 
 vince his readers of its being impossible for us to have a knowledge 
 or conception either of a physical or metaphysical Whole without 
 our having a knowledge of every separate part of it; that we have 
 no conception of a circle, for instance, unless one part of that con¬ 
 ception represents the important fact that the circumference is to 
 the diameter as 3*14159 is to 1,—nor of a house, unless we have 
 the minutest conception of every room and every plank in it. 
 
 In interpreting Mr. John S. Mill’s chapters against Logic, the 
 most important, and not always the most practicable requisite, is to 
 remember his former statement upon each subject. It may be well, 
 therefore, to remind his readers, that in the former chapter (p. 359) 
 all judgments, all expressions of knowledge, are described by him 
 as analytic, ie., as implying either a real or supposed knowledge in 
 the mind of him who frames the judgment; that there can be no 
 judgment without this knowledge ; that those who are ignorant of 
 the subject can pronounce no judgment at all about it, but merely 
 pursue, with respect to it, that synthetic process of appropriating 
 knowledge which is by Mr. Mill miscalled Judgment, but which is 
 really only learning, not judging, or, at the very utmost, learning how 
 to judge. The reader is there informed, even by Mr. Mill himself, 
 that every time we state a judgment we unfold knowledge, declar¬ 
 ing the predicate to be part of what is true of the subject. Mr. 
 Mill himself owns, in the page referred to, that ‘these judgments 
 
84 
 
 REASONING . 
 
 are analytical/—‘ propositions in which the concept of the predicate 
 is part of the concept of the subject / that c they convey no infor¬ 
 mation’ to the person himself who frames them, hut only to persons 
 unacquainted with the facts, ‘ and predicate separately the different 
 attributes which the name asserts collectively/ which they could 
 not do if the framer of them had no ‘ concept’ or knowledge of the 
 facts asserted. These are what we all mean by judgments in Logic ; 
 whether, with regard to those who are unacquainted with the 
 subject-matter of them,—to whom, as Mr. Mill says, they are new, 
 we may choose to call them also ‘ synthetical’ or not. 
 
 Some of these judgments, or unfoldings of knowledge, state 
 contingent truths, as that swiftness is true of, or part of, the boat I 
 am speaking of, whereas others state necessary truths. Of these 
 latter, some are self-evident, as that, when equals are added to 
 equals, the wholes are equal; and some not, as that the three angles 
 of a triangle are equal to two right angles. When a person ac¬ 
 quainted with the latter judgment— i.e., to whom it is no longer 
 matter of synthesis, and who, therefore, as Mr. Mill admits, per¬ 
 ceives * the concept of the predicate to be part of the concept of 
 the subject’—wishes to expound this to a person ignorant of it, he 
 supplies him with a third concept, which is also part of the subject- 
 concept, as Mr. Mill admits, and of which, as Mr. Mill also admits, 
 the predicate-concept is likewise part, i.e. y is known to be true 
 by the constructor of the Eeasoning. In these Analytic judg¬ 
 ments, then, not only is the predicate-notion, even according to 
 Mr. Mill, part of the subject-notion in the conclusion, but it is 
 known, ab initio , by the Expositor to be so, just as, and because, the 
 same relation is known by him to subsist in each of the premisses. 
 The learner or man of synthetic operations is in a very different 
 position. He has to discern relations, not to declare them. The 
 strenuous effort to confound these two very different classes of indi¬ 
 viduals, the expositors and the auditors, seems to be one of Jack’s 
 favourite dodges in this contest. 
 
 How then, inquires Mr. John S. Mill, affecting to be bewildered 
 by his fresh discernments, but really in pursuance of this very useful 
 stratagem,—how then can we learn in this way ‘ countless impor¬ 
 tant truths/ since we thus know all, in each case, before we begin 
 our inferences ? 
 
 It is quite true that Hamilton here speaks of all the a priori 
 truths which are not self-evident. But is Mr. Mill quite sure that 
 
REASONING. 
 
 85 
 
 he knows what Hamilton means by * We* ? Does Hamilton mean 
 the Expositors or the Auditors, or both ? If he means both, does 
 Mr. Mill bear well in mind to what extent, and in what sense, each 
 person can be both at once ? There are two ways in which we can 
 use Logic. We can use it to impart knowledge, i.e., to_ convince 
 others. This is perhaps its more common and original use. It is 
 so that Euclid uses it in his Elements, and Butler in his Analogy, 
 and everybody in ordinary conversation. We can also use it to 
 test knowledge, i.e., to convince ourselves. This latter i^the only 
 way in which the learner employs it; and he does so by constituting 
 himself, hypothetically, for the time being, his own informant—his 
 own logical Expositor upon any individual point. This, often un¬ 
 conscious, testing of our own knowledge by that analysis or un¬ 
 folding of thought which we call Logic, and which, in this case, 
 is, of course, only between self and self, may no doubt have led 
 superficial writers to imagine that Seasoning was, and that Judg¬ 
 ment was, an expression by us of thoughts unknown to us (as if 
 either word could have ever had such a meaning), instead of 
 denoting solely an expression by us of thoughts known, or at least 
 supposed to be known to us. We thus see clearly with what per¬ 
 fect truth Hamilton has said, that it is alone by the aid of Logic 
 that we discover that countless multitude of a priori propositions 
 which, although of extreme importance, are not self-evident. We 
 learn them, by its aid, not only when others teach them to us, but 
 even when we employ it ourselves to test those of them which have 
 been thus taught to us by others. Surely Mr. Mill must be aware, 
 or rather his readers must be aware, that the pronoun ‘We’ has a 
 generic use as a class-name as well as a singular one; that it then 
 contains under it, as species, both learners and Analysts,—both 
 those who know and those who do not know,—those who judge 
 and those who cannot; that those who employ inferences or reason¬ 
 ing from data are not those who ar er ignorant of these data, but 
 those only who have discovered them, and who, from their know¬ 
 ledge of them, are able to indicate what inferences are self-evident 
 in them; and that the Analyst or Logical Expositor, who unfolds 
 his knowledge by declaring a predicate to be true of a subject, is 
 not to be confounded with the learner who does not know whether 
 it is so or not. Does Mr. Mill indeed suppose that, because Hamil¬ 
 ton said, We are now able, by means of Logic, to discover the 
 countless multitudes of a priori truths which are not self-evident, 
 
86 
 
 REASONING. 
 
 Hamilton here meant those of us who already know and have 
 already tested the great truths alluded to,—not those of us who are 
 learning them from others by means of the Logic which others use 
 in teaching us, and which we, to some extent, use as a test when 
 we teach ourselves ? Is this the jarring we are told to expect? 
 
 And as to the principle of adjuncts and appendages which Mr. 
 Mill is so anxious to substitute for the common one of the Logicians, 
 how does he propose to exhibit its superiority ? His principle is, 
 that the appendage of the appendage is the appendage of that 
 which has the appendage, or, as he prefers to express it, that which 
 is conjoined to that which is conjoined to an object, is conjoined 
 also to the object; as though he said the tail of the tail is the tail 
 of the animal. We have here two questions to put. In the first 
 place, Is this principle true? In the second place, How does 
 it act? 
 
 In the first place, Is it true ? Every reader can see that swift¬ 
 ness is part of a swift boat, in the logical sense, just as four is part 
 of twelve, in a physical sense ; that as each object consists, in the 
 former sense, of all its attributes combined, each attribute is a part 
 of, i.e., is true of the object; that all that is true of the object is an 
 attribute of it, and, in this sense, part of it; and that the attribute 
 which is part of one of the attributes composing an object, is part 
 of the whole object. But in what imaginable sense is it true that, 
 if there is a swift boat, the swiftness is something superadded to 
 this swift boat ?—something over and above all the attributes which 
 constitute the swift thing so called ?—something not essential to a 
 swift thing?—something along with it, conjoined with it?—some¬ 
 thing that might be removed, and the swift boat still remain a swift 
 boat ? In like manner, physically speaking, four is part of twelve. 
 In what sense is it true to say that four is something conjoined 
 with twelve, or an appendage or adjunct of it ? Is not this rather 
 too rank ? The very crown of the self-contradictions sown so 
 thickly throughout Mr. Mill’s speculations ? 
 
 But in the second place, even if this principle of adjuncts and 
 appendages had been true instead of false, what would it have 
 effected ? How would the learner, with this principle, get to see 
 that the being equal to two right angles is a part of what is true of 
 the three angles in a triangle, better than he could get to see this 
 upon the ordinary principle ? How, in short, can he possibly by 
 this principle get to see the thing at all ? Mr. Mill’s own explana- 
 
REASONING. 
 
 87 
 
 tion of this (pp. 369-70) has almost as much lurking fun in it, under 
 the specious appearance of philosophical precision, as anything else 
 in the hook. There is here no vagueness of thought, as so often 
 elsewhere, leading to the unsuspecting admission of opposite doc¬ 
 trines in the same breath. It is all clean-cut waggery. Using the 
 symbols A, B, C, already given, he says that from our observing A 
 at one time conjoined with B, in a series of observations in which 
 we see nothing whatever of C, and C at another time conjoined 
 with B, in another series of observations in which we see nothing 
 whatever of A—in which it is A’s turn to be imperceptible, we may 
 safely and confidently infer that C is all the time conjoined with 
 A ! ‘If any one can believe this,’ says Mr. Mill very truly, else¬ 
 where, in words evidently intended for this joke of his, ‘ no self- 
 ‘ contradiction and no impossibility in any theory of consciousness 
 ‘ need stagger him. There is no such thing as a reduction to ab- 
 ‘ surdity if this is not one.’ 
 
 Then comes the question, What is human knowledge ? Is it 
 only that which we know and can know, or is it also that which 
 we cannot know ? Is it that which only this or that person pos¬ 
 sesses, or is it the sum-total of all men’s knowledge ? Is it that 
 which existed in the past, or is it that which will exist hereafter? 
 And a concept, what is it ? My conception of this pen—what do 
 we mean by this expression ? Our notion of Saturn’s ring—what 
 does that mean ? Here is a question (for it is all one question) 
 almost as vague as Mr. Mill could wish for, or any other person in 
 similar difficulties. Yet there is nothing vague about it for the 
 mind of one in earnest. 
 
 I answer, We speak of that as knowledge which is knowable, 
 as well as which is known,—which will be knowledge to-morrow, 
 although it is not so now, as well as that which, although not so 
 now, was so in former years; also that which is so now, even when 
 we are unconscious of it, unoccupied with it; yes, even when we 
 are ignorant of it. In all such cases we must, in our altercations 
 with Mr. Mill, attend carefully to the import of the pronoun ‘We.’ 
 It may not be the knowledge of men now living, or of this or that 
 man, but whether in the past or future, it is knowledge. To say 
 that this is not the knowledge of an object—that these are not the 
 conceptions of certain objects—merely because not my knowledge 
 or my conceptions, or the knowledge of this moment, would be 
 inaccurate in the last degree. After mentioning the ratio of the 
 
88 
 
 REASONING. 
 
 circumference to the diameter of a circle, ‘ Now is there/ Mr. Mill 
 asks, ‘ any sense consistent with the meaning of the terms, in which 
 ‘ it can he said that this recondite property formed part of the con- 
 ‘ cept (or knowledge) of a circle before it had been discovered by 
 ‘ mathematicians ? ... It is in nobody’s but a mathematician’s con- 
 ‘ cept (or knowledge) even now’ (p. 371). All Mr. Mill’s readers 
 well know that this knowledge was within our reach from the first; 
 that all that is knowable to mankind, all that is relative, is know¬ 
 ledge, and is called knowledge, whether it is known to this genera¬ 
 tion or not; and that it would not have been possible for the 
 knowledge of a circle not to have involved the ratio in question, 
 any more than that the knowledge of the number 144 could have 
 existed without necessarily involving the knowledge, whether dis¬ 
 covered or not, of its identity with 12X12. 
 
 Our knowledge of an object, therefore, may mean the least 
 knowledge of it possible to mankind, or the greatest, or any of the 
 intermediate degrees of knowledge. It may mean a child’s know¬ 
 ledge of it, or a grown person’s knowledge of it, or the utmost 
 knowledge of it possessed by any one individual, or the utmost 
 knowledge of it possessed by all mankind conjointly, or even the 
 utmost knowledge of it knowable, though still unknown. In all 
 which cases the context determines the interpretation, if nothing 
 else does so. And the same is true respecting our conception (con¬ 
 cept) or notion of an object,—terms here entirely synonymous 
 with knoiuledge. Either may comprehend eyery known attribute of 
 an object—every attribute which individualizes it, or it may com¬ 
 prehend but one, two, or more attributes common to that object "with 
 many others. It is called, in this latter case, the concept or con¬ 
 ception of a genus or of a class-name. We may therefore have the 
 concept (conception, knowledge, notion) of an individual, or the 
 concept, etc., of the highest genus; also, therefore, that of any of 
 the intermediate species ; and we may speak of it as ‘ my’ concept 
 of the object or genus—‘ our’ concept of it—‘the’ concept of it. 
 
 It is necessary to enter into these details, upon a very simple 
 subject, in order to meet Mr. Mill’s elaborate attempts to complicate 
 it. According to him, in many of his remarks, we can have no 
 knowledge or conception of any object unless we know everything 
 about it; which is, of course, impossible ; nor if we have a concep¬ 
 tion of an object, can there be, according to him, any conception 
 belonging to it except those which we are at the moment acquainted 
 
REASONING. 
 
 89 
 
 with, and of which we are at the moment conscious ; yet in other 
 remarks he will have it that even a child or an idiot can have some 
 conceptions of things, however many of them such individuals may 
 not have; and admits that these conceptions put together form 
 their conception of one thing. But it is not until he introduces the 
 expositor and the learner in their dealings with these conceptions, 
 that his chaos is complete. Then we are informed that no learner 
 can be made to see how, of two conceptions, one is true of the other, 
 by pointing out to him a third conception in which they are so, 
 and are informed how impossible it is that, of two conceptions in 
 any one given spirit, one should be true of the other, unless that 
 spirit perceives intuitively that it is so. All which he makes out 
 very clearly by a sort of thimblerig, in which (without ever being 
 able to say, even when we see it, where it is) we find our knowledge 
 —the pea—sometimes under the learner’s thimble, sometimes 
 under that of the teacher, and sometimes, allied to oxygen, calmly 
 floating in the summer air, ‘ like the wild goose, unclaimed of any 
 man.’ I must not omit to mention that he has likewise in this and 
 some other chapters a merry little theory about our knowledge or 
 concept being a sort of little sac or bag with ‘ four corners,’ tied 
 round our necks, into which we are constantly putting, and out of 
 which we are constantly taking, all we learn and all we know ; in 
 which little bag originally there is nothing at all, of whose existence 
 also we are for the most part unconscious, but of whose contents we 
 never can be either ignorant, or forgetful, or unconscious. 
 
 It is necessary that I should now also advert to Hamilton’s use 
 of one of the above terms for human knowledge, which Mr. Mill 
 has sought to invest with as much confusion as possible in con¬ 
 nexion with this point. I mean the word * concept.’ That the 
 English writers apply the term * conception’ to our concrete know¬ 
 ledge of the individual, as well as to our abstract knowledge of the 
 class, is too well known to need illustration. Mr. Mill does not seem 
 to deny this. Nor can anything be clearer than that Hamilton so 
 used it also, viz., of the individual, or maximum of Comprehension, 
 as well as of the class. This Mr. Mill affects to deny ; and there¬ 
 upon accuses Hamilton of inconsistency when he finds him doing 
 so (see pp. 337-8). That Hamilton, however, uses the word to denote 
 our knowledge of both kinds—our knowledge of the individual, 
 which cannot be logically divided, quite as much as of the class 
 which can,—and so explains it, is manifest from his Lectures, whether 
 
90 
 
 REASONING. 
 
 it be true or not that he habitually used it, or required to use it, 
 more in the one sense than in the other. By it he means the quality 
 or fasciculus of qualities which constitutes the genus, and by it he 
 means the fasciculus of qualities which constitutes Charles or Lon¬ 
 don,— i.e.j by which one individual is sufficiently distinguished from 
 all others. It is quite true that this knowledge of the individual 
 and the concrete is always to some extent abstract. It does not, for 
 instance, give us Charles as either sitting or standing, nor London 
 as either in the daylight or at night. There is, however, no diffi¬ 
 culty in seeing that our abstraction does not convert either into a 
 genus, and that when Hamilton speaks of Charles or London as a 
 concept, and only according to that general knowledge of each 
 which distinguishes each in our understanding from all other towns 
 and men, he is not in the slightest degree inconsistent. That 
 Hamilton does so use the term, and professes so to use it, and that 
 his doing so involves no inconsistency, and that Mr. Mill was aware 
 of all this, the latter’s readers will see sufficiently from such pas¬ 
 sages in Hamilton’s Lectures as the following :—‘ The term “ con - 
 ‘ ception” means two things. . . . Conception means both the act of 
 ‘ conceiving and the object conceived. ... For the act of conceiving 
 ‘ the term “ conception” should be employed, and that exclusively; 
 ‘ while, for the object of conception, or that which is conceived, the 
 ‘ term concept should be used’ (iii. p. 41). Can any one suppose 
 that the word ‘object’ here means a genus or a species only? 
 Again :—‘ Concept or notion . . . terms employed as convertible. . . . 
 ‘ Conception , the act of which concept is the result, expresses the act 
 ‘ of comprehending or grasping up into unity the various qualities 
 ‘ by which an object is characterized’ (pp. 119, 120). Is not that, 
 then, to be regarded as a concept which is the maximum of compre¬ 
 hension, as well as that which is the minimum of it? Is not that 
 to be so regarded in which all those qualities are ‘ grasped up into 
 unity,’ which distinguish the concrete individual from all others ? 
 
 ‘ The more distinctive characters the concept contains, the more 
 ‘ minutely it will distinguish and determine. ... If it contain a 
 ‘ plenum of distinctive characters, it must contain the distinctive, 
 
 ‘ the determining characters of some individual object. ... In re- 
 ‘ gard to its comprehension,... it is here at its maximum, the con- 
 ‘ cept being a complement of the whole attributes of an individual 
 ‘ object, which, by these attributes, it thinks and discriminates from 
 ‘ every other. . . . The maximum of Comprehension and the mini- 
 
REASONING. 
 
 91 
 
 ‘ mum of Extension are found in the concept of an individual’ (pp. 
 148, 149). ‘ When the Extension of a concept becomes a minimum ; 
 ‘ that is, when it contains no other notions under it, it is called an 
 ‘ individual ’ (p. 146). ‘ An individual notion cannot be divided’ 
 
 (p. 147). ‘ As Division is the analysis of a higher or more general 
 
 ‘ concept into others lower and less general, if a concept be an indivi - 
 ‘ dual , that is, only a bundle of individual qualities, it is indivisible, 
 4 —is, in fact, not a proper or abstract concept at all, but only a con- 
 
 * crete representation of Imagination’ (p. 152). Although properly 
 and strictly speaking this is true, yet, as I have already observed, 
 all knowledge of the individual is and must be considered as in 
 some respects, and to a certain extent, abstract,—all that is necessary 
 being that the qualities known should sufficiently distinguish the 
 one object from all others, and thus speaking of the known attri¬ 
 butes of Socrates, Hamilton says that they ‘ distinguish him from 
 all other men, and together make up my notion or concept of Kind 
 (p. 78). ‘We must not collate notions abstract and notions concrete’ 
 (p. 155). We see then that, according to Hamilton, there are con¬ 
 crete concepts, as well as abstract ones. ‘ From what has been for- 
 ‘ merly stated, you are aware that the quantity of comprehension, 
 ‘ belonging to a notion, is the complement of characters which it 
 ‘ contains in it; and that this quantity is at its maximum in an 
 ‘ individual. Thus the notion of the individual Socrates, contains 
 ‘ in it,’ etc. (p. 220). But further : Does Mr. Mill mean to say that 
 Hamilton holds it to be impossible to predicate anything of the 
 individual, or the individual of anything, and therefore excludes 
 the individual from the syllogism, when we read in the Lectures 
 (p. 73) that Logic treats only of ‘ Concepts, Judgments, and Bea- 
 sonings’ ? Does this mean that the individual has no place in 
 Logic ? Finally, Hamilton has, in the Discussions, long subse¬ 
 quently to whatever he wrote in his Lectures, elaborately explained 
 to us that the knowledge of the individual, whereby we distinguish 
 it from all others, is as truly a concept as our knowledge of the 
 genus is, and that although all concepts are not images, all images 
 are concepts. ‘ The understanding, thought proper, notion, concept, 
 ‘ etc., may coincide or not with Imagination, representation proper, 
 ‘ image, etc. The two faculties do not coincide in a general notion; 
 ‘ for we cannot represent Man or Horse in an actual image without 
 ‘ individualizing the universal; and thus contradiction emerges. 
 
 * But in the individual, say Socrates or Bucephalus, they do coin- 
 
92 
 
 REASONING. 
 
 1 cide ; for I see no valid ground why we should not think, in the 
 ‘ strict sense of the word, or conceive (have concepts of) the indivi- 
 ‘ duals which we represent. In like manner, there is no mutual 
 ‘ contradiction between the image and the concept of the Infinite 
 ‘ or Absolute, if these he otherwise possible ; for there is not neces- 
 ‘ sarily involved the incompatibility of the one act of cognition with 
 ‘ the other’ (Discuss, xiii., note). 
 
 It is in spite of these and scores of similar explanations that 
 Mr. Mill represents Hamilton as holding that we cannot have a 
 concept of the individual object, and as never expressing himself as 
 if we could but inconsistently, and by mistake. 
 
 Let us now recapitulate what all are agreed upon respecting the 
 import and use of this term ‘ concept.’ Doing this will assist the 
 general reader, for whom alone I reply, or need to reply, to this 
 Rationalistic squib of Mr. Mill’s. 
 
 1. Concepts are either generic (general, universal, abstract), as 
 when we say, The Horse exists in every quarter of the world; which 
 remark applies to no one horse; or they are individual (concrete, 
 singular), as the concept of a given horse, when we say, My 
 horse is in the stable; which remark applies to one horse, and to 
 one horse only. 
 
 2. The generic concept is not an image in the mind, i.e., an 
 idea, but only a general knowledge or notion,—a symbol of an 
 image, not an image,—of the object which would, in each concrete 
 case, be found existing. The individual concept, or concrete con¬ 
 cept, is an idea or mental image, called also a mental representa¬ 
 tion, or representation in imagination, or concrete representation ; 
 and being an image, is not the symbol of one. We have, there¬ 
 fore, image-concepts as well as genus-concepts or class-con¬ 
 cepts, the former being of individuals only, the latter of classes 
 or genera. 
 
 3. We think about, or of, a generic concept, but cannot figure it 
 to ourselves, or imagine it, or, as Mr. Mill and the Scottish writers 
 generally say, ‘ think it.’ Whereas we not only can think about an 
 individual or concrete concept, but we can also ‘ think it,’ i.e., figure 
 it or represent it in imagination,—imagine it, give it a definite 
 shape, and thus make an image of it. Since the expression Ho 
 think a thing’ has been allowed to creep into philosophy, let us be 
 careful to distinguish well between thinking a thing and thinking 
 of a thing, or about a thing. 
 
REASONING. 
 
 93 
 
 4. The concept of an object or of a class of objects can either 
 be partial or complete. In most cases, each person’s concept of any¬ 
 thing, whether generic or individual, is partial; and this is never 
 in Logic what is meant when we say, The concept of a thing, 
 or, Our concept of it. We then mean nothing partial. The com - 
 plete concept, of an individual or of a class, means all that is at 
 all known or even knowable and thinkable about it. When, for 
 instance, we speak of the concept attached to the term Hamilton 
 in these pages,—the concept which we have of him, and which 
 we employ as a symbol of him, we do not mean Mr. Mill’s con¬ 
 cept of him, nor any one other person’s concept of him. Every 
 one knows that. 
 
 5. The term ‘ concept’ means neither more nor less than what 
 is ordinarily called ‘ conception,’—when we say, My conception of 
 that horse is different from yours, or, Our conception of the horse 
 is different from our conception of the buffalo ; but the term has 
 been adopted by Logicians in order to leave the term ‘ conception’ 
 to denote exclusively the mental act or process so called, and of 
 which the concept is the result. Our English word, ‘ conceptions,’ 
 does not denote only the conceptions of genera. 
 
 6. ‘ Concept’ is synonymous with the ‘ signification’ or notion 
 attached to a word. One term means nothing that the others do 
 not, whether it be the signification of a proper name or of the ex¬ 
 pression, ‘ My horse,’ or of the class-word, ‘ horse.’ Each of these 
 expressions signifies something, and what it signifies is the concept 
 of it, or the signification of it, or the notion of it. 
 
 7. The concept of an object is not the object itself. It is only 
 the object as we know it. It is only that knowledge (of the object) 
 which alone we can think of or speak of, except when we have the 
 object itself present, and even then we think more and speak more 
 of the concept than of that merely which is presented to the senses, 
 often perhaps to the eye alone. This concept or knowledge is a 
 symbol of the object, just as the name given to the concept is a 
 symbol of the concept, as well as of the object. The concept con¬ 
 sists of all that is known and knowable about the object, and serves 
 so completely as a substitute for the object itself in all our thoughts, 
 that what we say or think about that which is known and know- 
 able under any term, is regarded in all respects as said or thought 
 quite as much about the object to which that term is applied, and 
 about which this knowledge is. To say that a word is the word 
 
94 
 
 REASONING. 
 
 for a horse, for instance, but not for the knowledge which is 
 known and knowable under that name, whether the horse still 
 exists or not, is clearly more than a mere quibble. It is false. 
 If there were any truth in it, it would be true to say that by 
 the term ‘ horse’ we do not mean what we know and may yet 
 know under that name, but what we neither know nor can ever 
 know. 
 
 From this digression upon Concepts, rendered necessary by Mr. 
 Mill’s persistent efforts at confusion, I return to the main issues 
 of the chapter; and here we see that Logicians are right when they 
 teach that‘ Reasoning is the comparison of two notions by means of 
 a third that ‘ Reasoning is a mode of ascertaining that one notion 
 is a part of anotherand that one of its uses is to enable learners 
 to discover ‘ that countless multitude of (a 'priori ) truths which, 
 though of high, of paramount importance, are not self-evident/ 
 All which Mr. Mill affects to deny. It only remains that I should 
 point out how completely Hamilton’s ‘ little foe’ backs out of all his 
 burlesque challengings and trumpetings in this chapter, showing 
 his two assertions, as he does, to be mere fun, and declaring himself 
 as in reality agreeing upon both these points with Hamilton and 
 the Logicians. 
 
 That one notion can be part of (true of) another whether we know 
 that it is so or not. Mr. Mill not only admits, in the passages 
 already given under the former chapter, that one notion can be part 
 of another, but acknowledges this again here when he says (p. 369) 
 
 ‘ that one notion is part of another’ in all cases in which we know 
 what we are saying,—always when we are unfolding knowledge, 
 when we are Teachers, Analysts, Logicians, and Expositors. His 
 only quarrel here with the Logicians is as to whether our knowing 
 or not knowing that one notion is part of another, makes any dif¬ 
 ference as to the fact of its being so. Logicians say it does not; 
 that our knowing a thing is true or not, never makes the least dil 
 ference as to its truth. Mr. Mill affects to say it does ; nay, that 
 it determines the whole question of its truth. He nevertheless 
 admits everywhere the contrary. He admits that the being equal 
 to two right angles is a general notion, and that the three angles 
 of a triangle is another general notion ; and that these two notions 
 can be contemplated by a person who has not the least knowledge 
 that the one is true of the other. That one portion of knowledge 
 can be part of, can belong essentially to, another portion, and this 
 
REASONING. 
 
 95 
 
 or that person not know it, he also acknowledges, when he admits 
 that the notion of swiftness may be part of some men’s notion of a 
 certain boat, without this or that man’s knowing that it is so. He 
 acknowledges this, likewise, when he admits (p. 371) that the cir¬ 
 cumference and the diameter, being in the ratio of 3*14159 to 1 
 (which is a general notion), is part of what was knowable of a 
 circle,—part of mankind’s possible conception or possible knowledge 
 of a circle, although for a long time unknown to any one to be so. 
 He acknowledges this, also, when he acknowledges (ibid) that the 
 only difference between these two conceptions (this ratio and a 
 circle), as they exist in the mind of the informed man and of the 
 ignorant man, is that, in the case of the former mind, the relation 
 really subsisting between its two notions is known to the mind 
 which contemplates them, whereas, in the case of the latter mind, 
 this same relation which really subsists between its two notions is 
 not known to the mind contemplating them. Mr. Mill, therefore, 
 more suo, admits, as well as denies, that one notion can be true of 
 another whether we know that it is or not; and all who entertain 
 any doubt as to whether he was in earnest or not when he wrote 
 his book, may have their doubts instantly removed if they will 
 only attend to his denial of this very obvious proposition, and to 
 the arguments by which he seems , in this chapter, to be defending 
 his denial of it. 
 
 That one notion can be shown to be 'part of (true of) another 
 notion by the aid of a third. This Mr. Mill asserts as fully as any 
 of us when he acknowledges (joassim ) that a learner who has two 
 distinct notions present to his mind, without being able to discern 
 that one is, or even whether one is, true of the other, may be en¬ 
 abled to see that one is true of the other by the Logician or teacher 
 who points out to him a third notion which he can compare with 
 both,—as in the case, for instance, of the two distinct notions, the 
 being equal to two right angles, and the being the three angles 
 of a triangle, or the being in the ratio of 344159 to 1, and the 
 being the circumference and diameter of a circle. ‘ By combining,’ 
 says Mr. Mill, ‘ the two sets of observations (or two portions of 
 knowledge thence derived), we are enabled to discover what was 
 not contained in either of them’ for the learner, but what the 
 Logician helping him already knew (p. 370). He also says, ‘A 
 ‘judgment which is not intuitively evident, can be arrived at 
 ‘ through the medium of premisses’ (p. 369). 
 
90 
 
 REASONING. 
 
 I have written as if Mr. Mill might have been serious, and it is 
 true that I could now proceed to explain, with a considerable show 
 of probability, how he might have fallen into the most preposterous 
 mistakes upon the most commonplace points of Logic, either not¬ 
 withstanding, or, indeed (it would seem now-a-days), in consequence 
 of a marked amount of intelligence upon his part. But I shall 
 leave that task for those who like it. To me it would seem a 
 puerile one, and an unnecessarily harsh one. To show, however, 
 that I have not overlooked anything that could be said in favour 
 of this absurd interpretation, which Mr. Mill’s playful volume has 
 received from some enlightened critics in their efforts either con¬ 
 scientiously to prevent unguarded readers from being misguided by 
 it, or artfully to give it a greater appearance of having been written 
 as a serious Work on the Logic and Philosophy of these days, I 
 here acknowledge candidly, that in the case of a deficient intellect 
 dabbling in Logic and Metaphysics, any one of the eight following 
 confusions might have arisen, and would of itself alone have led 
 to all the 4 blunders’ of this and of the two preceding chapters :— 
 
 1. Any one who had read Hamilton, or any other writer upon 
 Logic, superficially and carelessly enough to suppose him to under¬ 
 stand by ‘ concept’ (whether the concept of a concrete individual or 
 of a class) anything less than mankind’s knowledge, conception, or 
 apprehension of it, might easily have made all the blunders. 
 
 2. Any one who was unable to see that although all the proof 
 of a geometrical proposition is self-evident (intuitively perceived), 
 it is nevertheless, at least in the first instance, successively so, and 
 not by any means ab initio and simultaneously so, would have been 
 plunged into confusion enough to conduct him, without any affecta¬ 
 tion, into all the puerilities of these chapters. 
 
 3. Any one could have made all these blunders who had never 
 made the objectivity and subjectivity of things his study,—anyone 
 who was wild enough to suppose that we think of things or reason 
 about them otherwise than as we know them, conceive them, appre¬ 
 hend them ; or that our knowledge, concept (conception), or appre¬ 
 hension of objects, is ever held by Logicians to be in any other way 
 related to the objects themselves than as means of considering their 
 relations, an instrument of thought, and mere symbol of the object 
 thought of, i.e., has any other thing to do with the matter, more than 
 is implied in the fact that we cannot reason about objects without 
 this knowledge, without these concepts, without these apprehen- 
 
REASONING. 
 
 97 
 
 sions (p. 370), or who cannot see that this relation between concep¬ 
 tions and objects is such that whatever exists in the one has 
 something corresponding to it existing in the other, and that this 
 corresponding point is as true of the conception as it is of the object, 
 and of the object as it is of the conception. 
 
 4. If we could think so poorly of Mr. Mill’s capacity as to sup¬ 
 pose him not to be able to see the difference between a whole in 
 Logic and a whole in Physics, and not to be able to see that it, 
 nevertheless, can be as impossible to recognise intuitively the rela¬ 
 tion of Whole and Part in Physics, even where it exists, as this can 
 be in Logic, we should, in that miserable case, have key sufficient 
 to all the self-contradictions and statements inconsistent with fact, 
 among which Mr. Mill disports himself throughout these chapters 
 upon Logic. 
 
 5. Even if we suppose him not to know that to be part of a 
 thing, in the logical sense of that expression, denotes only to be true 
 of it,— to be in some sense predicable of it,— to be part of what is true 
 about it, we need go no further in quest of a principle to account 
 for all that utter bosh, known by the name of f Mill upon Hamilton,’ 
 in matters logical. But who could be so unjust as this to Mr. 
 Mill? 
 
 6. Or if we could bring ourselves to believe that by the concept 
 (conception), or the knowledge of Saturn’s ring, Mr. Mill really sup¬ 
 poses Hamilton or any of us to mean a village school-boy’s con¬ 
 ception of it and knowledge of it, and really supposes that the 
 completest concept of it,—the largest amount of knowledge of it, 
 being a thing probably not yet attained, or, if attained, not probably 
 all assembled in any one finite spirit, is therefore to be regarded 
 as something ‘ conventional,’ or, still more singular, as something 
 ‘ floating in the air’ (p. 370) we must see that an intellect of the 
 order here attributed to Mr. Mill, especially enveloped in such a 
 mist, could not have escaped falling into any of the curious quag¬ 
 mires,—the ‘ mistakes ’ (as they are called) in which we find him 
 here floundering so good-naturedly and self-denyingly. But who 
 is credulous enough—not to say unjust enough—to believe such a 
 thing as this of such a writer ? 
 
 7. Or if we can imagine Mr. Mill to have confounded teaching 
 and learning,—the teacher and the learner, from the frequent and 
 often unconscious interchange of these actions when we learn, we 
 may then honestly call every one of his hoaxes a ‘ mistake,’ instead 
 
 G 
 
98 
 
 REASONING. 
 
 of a hoax. These all hang more or less upon the hypothesis that a 
 person can form a judgment of what he does not know, as well as 
 of what he knows ; that there are certain true judgments which 
 are an unfolding of ignorance, not of knowledge; that Logic is 
 employed with success in both cases; in fact, that it is mainly, if 
 not solely, successful in the unfoldings of ignorance,—in the un - 
 foldings of what we do not know,—in the judgments which are 
 not analytic; that it is, upon each individual point, the learner 
 who has to teach, and the teacher who has to learn. I freely admit, 
 of course, that if there exists in Mr. Mill’s mind a capacity for such 
 bamboozlement as this implies, instead of its being merely sup¬ 
 posed by him to exist in the minds of his readers,—the enthusiastic, 
 for the most part, it is true, and the less experienced,—we must 
 not, in this case, call his fantastic statements hoaxes, or a Panto¬ 
 mime, but blunders and misconceptions avec des circonstances 
 attenuantes. 
 
 8. Finally, if we can suppose Mr. Mill not to know the differ¬ 
 ence between an Adjunct and a Part,—not to see that a Part is not 
 an Adjunct,—we must in this case also suppose him in earnest in 
 all he has here written. If I had only known of him through this 
 so-called ‘Examination’ of Hamilton’s writings, and had never seen 
 either his Essays on Political Economy, or his Principles of Evi¬ 
 dence, misguidingly called ‘ Logic,’ I should have been disposed to 
 join the rest of his critics in regarding the ‘ Examination’ as an 
 earnest effort upon his part to understand what he could not. 
 What now seems broad farce would then have seemed mistake; 
 and in that case, as far as I am myself concerned, I should probably 
 have been tempted to place my finger upon this confusion of a Part 
 and an Adjunct as being, in this case, the origin of Evil. Any one 
 who once entered upon so false a principle as that the part of any¬ 
 thing can be regarded not only as an adjunct of the other parts, but 
 as an adjunct also of the whole thing,—any one who had the im¬ 
 pression that swiftness was not part of a swift boat, but something 
 conjoined with such a boat, or that the ratio of the diameter to the 
 circumference is not part of the circle, but something superadded 
 to it, or that, in physical affairs, the legs are conjoined with, super- 
 added to, the whole chair, and not, strictly speaking, parts of it— 
 conjoined with the other parts of it; any person, I say, who 
 laboured under this singular hallucination could not well fail to 
 have become entangled and lost in the thick wood of Logic-chopping 
 
REASONING. 
 
 99 
 
 and of Logic-juggling in which we here find Mr. Mill bewildered, 
 especially when hounded on by so unscrupulous and irrational a 
 party as the Rationalists of these days. But with Mr. Mill’s other 
 works before us, we are compelled to assume that he only affects 
 this extravagant misapprehension about the Part and the Adjunct, 
 and that it was not this, nor anything of this kind, whatever else 
 it was, that brought him into the wood. 
 
 Prom the eight foregoing paragraphs it will, I trust, be seen 
 that the writer of these pages is not behind any one in the discern¬ 
 ment of excuses (if they were necessary) for Mr. Mill’s being entirely 
 wrong in every one of his statements against Hamilton. But is it, 
 indeed, absurd to say that Mr. Mill is too intelligent and too well 
 informed, even in Philosophy and Logic, the subjects with which he 
 is least familiar, to have fallen into such confusions as I have now 
 mentioned,—confusions, all which his statements against Hamilton 
 would, if serious, oblige us to suppose ? or is it absurd to say that 
 he could not have studied Hamilton as carefully as he professes to 
 have done without knowing better upon all these points than he 
 here affects to know ? Is it not harsh enough, and sad enough, 
 to have to say that he only supposed certain classes of the com¬ 
 munity, those who read him and admire him in Logic and Philosophy, 
 to be susceptible of these confusions, and that he only employed 
 the confusions artistically—ay, even with a creditable ingenuity, 
 in this self-imposed, and much to be lamented, character of Jack 
 the Giant-killer? 
 
 Be that as it may, one thing most manifest and most gratifying 
 is that, after all these optical illusions of thrust and cut are over, 
 the renowned Logician of the Isles stands forth before us, untouched, 
 even unassailed, in all his magnificence and in all his truth. 
 
 To conclude this First Part,—the first Act of our little Drama. 
 It has now been shown against Mr. Mill—(1.) That Hamilton and 
 the Logicians are right in holding and teaching, as they all do, that 
 we think with conceptions of the things we think about, and not 
 without conceptions of them; (2.) That one such conception can 
 be part of another, either self-evidently or not self-evidently; the 
 predicate constituting or not constituting part, in Logic, of the sub¬ 
 ject, according as the judgment is affirmative or negative; and 
 (3.) That wherever one conception is not self-evidently part of the 
 other, we can ascertain whether it is part or not by extending our 
 knowledge of these two conceptions,— i.e., we can do so by the aid 
 
100 
 
 REASONING. 
 
 of a third conception, and of the two relations in which this third 
 conception stands to the other two conceptions. 
 
 It has also been shown that Mr. Mill not only disputes each of 
 these three propositions, hut assents to each of them in the very 
 chapter in which he disputes it,— that his statement against 
 Hamilton is not only everywhere groundless, but that every¬ 
 where Mr. Mill himself admits it is so. 
 
 This is what I undertook to establish respecting the three chap- 
 . ters here under review. I proceed now to the same task respecting 
 the eight succeeding chapters of Mr. Mill’s work. 
 
 END OF PART I.