es which I ascribe to God exist in Him in an
infinite degree. Now, to believe this proposition, I
must, of course, be conscious of its meaning; but I am
not therefore conscious of the Infinite God as an object
of conception; for this would require further an
apprehension of the manner in which these infinite
attributes coexist so as to form one object. The whole
argument of this eighth chapter is confused, owing to
Mr. Mill not having distinguished between those passages
in which Sir W. Hamilton is merely using an _argumentum
ad hominem_ in relation to Reid, and those in which he
is reasoning from general principles.

But if Mr. Mill is unjust towards the distinction between Knowledge and
Belief, as held by Sir W. Hamilton, he makes ample amends to the injured
theory in the next chapter, by enlarging the province of credibility far
beyond any extent which Hamilton would have dreamed of claiming for it.
Conceivability or inconceivability, he tells us, are usually dependent on
association; and it is quite possible that, under other associations, we
might be able to conceive, and therefore to believe, anything short of
the direct contradiction that the same thing is and is not. It is not in
itself incredible, that a square may at the same time be round, that two
straight lines may enclose a space, or even that two and two may make
five.[AZ] But whatever concessions Mr. Mill may make on this point, he
is at least fully determined that Sir W. Hamilton shall derive no benefit
from them; for he forthwith proceeds to charge Sir William with confusing
three distinct senses of the term _conception_--a confusion which exists
solely in his own imagination,[BA]--and to assert that the Philosophy
of the Conditioned is entirely founded on a mistake, inasmuch as infinite
space on the one hand, and, on the other, both an absolute minimum and an
infinite divisibility of space, are perfectly conceivable. With regard to
the former of these two assertions, Mr. Mill's whole argument is
vitiated, as we have already shown, by his confusion between _infinite_
and _indefinite_; but it is worth while to quote one of his special
instances in this chapter, as a specimen of the kind of reasoning which
an eminent writer on logic can sometimes employ. In reference to Sir W.
Hamilton's assertion, that infinite space would require infinite time to
conceive it, he says, "Let us