tion besides pain or pleasure; but, as regards such, both reward and punishment are irrelevant. I think Mill very successful in illustrating the independence of moral good and evil on the question of the will. He is not too strong in his remonstrance against Hamilton's attempt to frighten people into free-will by declaring that the existence of the Creator hangs upon it. It was quite in Hamilton's way to destroy all the other arguments in favor of a doctrine that he espoused, in order to give freer course to his own. He damages the advocacy of free-will by his slashing antinomy of the two contrary doctrines. It is certainly a clearing of the ground, if nothing more, to affirm, as he does so strongly, that "a determination by motives can not escape from necessitation." Such admissions give an opponent some advantage, but only as respects him individually. The general controversy, however, must proceed on different lines from his, and hence the waste of strength in following his lead.
Hamilton's attack on the study of mathematics was a battery of learned quotations brought out to confound Whewell and Cambridge. It is not very convincing; it hardly even does what Mill thinks toleration of hostile criticism tends to do, namely, bring out the half-truth neglected by the other side. It was not worth while to write so long a chapter in reply; but Mill, partly from what he learned from Comte, and partly from his own logical studies, had a pat answer to every one of Hamilton's points. Most notable, in my view, is the paragraph about the disastrous influence of the mathematical method of Descartes in all subsequent speculation. He seems there to say that the a priori spirit has been chiefly kept up by the example of mathematics. Now, I freely admit that the axioms of mathematics have been the favorite illustration of intuition; but there is no certainty that, in the absence of that example, intuitionism would not have had its full swing during the last two centuries. Mill admits that the crudity of Bacon's inductive canons had an equally bad effect on English speculation; but all this shows simply that error is the parent of error.
The two subjects taken up while the "Hamilton" was still in hand—John Austin and Comte—deserve to be ranked among the best of his minor compositions. The "Austin" article took him back to his early days when he worked with Bentham and attended the lectures of Austin at University College. It does not seem to contain much originality, but it is a logical treat. The two "Comte" articles are still more valuable, as being Mill's contribution to the elucidation of Comte's philosophy. It will be long ere an equally searching and dispassionate estimate of Comte be given to the world; indeed, no one can again combine the same qualifications for the work.
