the marked distinctions of human character as
innate, and in the main indelible, and to ignore the irresistible proofs
that by far the greater part of those differences, whether between
individuals, races, or sexes, are such as not only might but naturally
would be produced by differences in circumstances, is one of the chief
hindrances to the rational treatment of great social questions, and one
of the greatest stumbling-blocks to human improvement. This tendency has
its source in the intuitional metaphysics which characterised the
reaction of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth, and it is a
tendency so agreeable to human indolence, as well as to conservative
interests generally, that unless attacked at the very root, it is sure
to be carried to even a greater length than is really justified by the
more moderate forms of the intuitional philosophy.... Considering then
the writings and fame of Sir W. Hamilton as the great fortress of the
intuitional philosophy in this country, a fortress the more formidable
from the imposing character, and the, in many respects, great personal
merits and mental endowments of the man, I thought it might be a real
service to philosophy to attempt a thorough examination of all his most
important doctrines, and an estimate of his general claims to eminence
as a philosopher; and I was confirmed in this resolution by observing
that in the writings of at least one, and him one of the ablest, of Sir
W. Hamilton's followers, his peculiar doctrines were made the
justification of a view of religion which I hold to be profoundly
immoral--that it is our duty to bow down and worship before a Being
whose moral attributes are affirmed to be unknowable by us, and to be
perhaps extremely different from those which, when speaking of our
fellow-creatures, we call by the same name' (pp. 273-275).

Thus we see that even where the distance between the object of his
inquiry and the practical wellbeing of mankind seemed farthest, still
the latter was his starting point, and the doing 'a real service to
philosophy' only occurred to him in connection with a still greater and
more real service to those social causes for which, and which only,
philosophy is worth cultivating. In the _System of Logic_ the
inspiration had been the same.

'The notion that truths external to the mind,' he writes, 'may be known
by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and
experience, is, I am persuaded, in