what has
misled Mr. Mill), that the laws of Identity, Contradiction, and Excluded
Middle, are laws of things as well as laws of thought;[BC] but he says
nothing about these laws as predicating infinite or finite extension. On
the contrary, he expressly classifies Space under the law of Relativity,
the violation of which indicates what may exist, but what we are unable
to conceive as existing. Briefly, the law of Excluded Middle (to take
this instance alone) is a law of things only in its abstract form,
"Everything must be A or not A" (_extended_, if you please, or _not
extended_); but in its subordinate form, "Everything extended must be
extended infinitely or finitely," it is only applicable, and only
intended by Hamilton to be applied, to those _phenomena_ which are
already given as extended in some degree.

[BC] _Discussions_, p. 603.

We have now examined the first six chapters of Mr. Mill's book,
containing his remarks on that portion of Sir W. Hamilton's philosophy
which he justly regards as comprising the most important of the doctrines
which specially belong to Hamilton himself. The next chapter is an
episode, in which Mr. Mill turns aside from Sir W. Hamilton to criticise
Mr. Mansel's _Bampton Lectures_. As our limits do not permit us to carry
on the argument at present through the remainder of Mr. Mill's remarks on
Hamilton himself, we shall conclude our notice with a few words on this
chapter, as closing the properly metaphysical portion of Mr. Mill's book,
and as affording ample proof that, in this department of philosophy at
least, Mr. Mill's powers of misapprehension do not cease when Sir W.
Hamilton is no longer their object.

Mr. Mill's method of criticism makes it generally necessary to commence
with a statement of the criticised theory as it really is, before
proceeding to his exposition of it as it is not. The present instance
offers no exception to this rule. Mr. Mansel's argument may be briefly
stated as follows. The primary and essential conception of God,
imperatively demanded by our moral and religious consciousness, is that
of a _person_. But personality implies intellectual and moral attributes;
and the only direct and immediate knowledge which we have of such
attributes is derived from the testimony of self-consciousness, bearing
witness to their existence in a certain manner in ourselves. But when we
endeavour to transfer the conception of personality, thus obtained, to
the domain of the