ween an omnipotent Deity who cannot be
benevolent because misery is permitted, and a benevolent Deity with
limited powers; and Mill sums up the discussion, doubtfully, in favour
of a Being with great but limited powers, whose motives cannot be
satisfactorily fathomed by the human intellect.

This halting conclusion indicates a departure from the pure empiricism
of his school, and even the inadequacy of the argument shows the
effort that Mill was making towards some fellow-feeling with spiritual
conceptions. As Mr. Stephen points out, there is a curious
approximation, on some points, between Mill and his arch-enemy
Mansel--between the conditioned and unconditioned philosophies. Both
of them lay stress on the moral perplexities involved in arguing from
the wasteful and relentless course of Nature to an estimate of the
divine attributes. And both agree that the existence of evil is a
serious difficulty; though Mansel's solution, or evasion, of it is by
insisting that the ways of the unconditioned are necessarily for the
most part unknowable, while Mill leans to the possibility that God's
power or intelligence may be incomplete. Upon either hypothesis we
must confess that our knowledge is imperfect and very fallible.
Mr. Stephen has no trouble in exposing the philosophical weakness
of Mill's attitude; but we are mainly concerned to compare it
briefly with the position of his predecessors, for the purpose of
continuing a rapid survey of the course and filiation of Utilitarian
doctrines. When the orthodox Utilitarians definitely rejected all
theology--though until Philip Beauchamp appeared, in 1822, they made
no direct attack upon it--they believed that the fall of theology
would also bring down religion, which they regarded as the source of
motives that were fictitious, misleading, and profoundly unscientific.
Mill agreed that a supernatural origin could not be ascribed to
received maxims of morality without harming them, because to
consecrate rules of conduct was to interdict free examination of them,
and to paralyse their natural development in accordance with changes
of circumstance. Looking back over the interminable controversies, and
the successive variations in form and spirit that every great religion
has undergone, this objection does not seem to us very formidable. But
Mill's evident object was to reconcile the cultivation of religious
feelings with his principle of free thought for individuals. In
accepting Comte