is not, it is by that very possibility marked out as
incomplete, and capable of a higher perfection. If it is actually
everything, it possesses no characteristic feature by which it can be
distinguished from anything else, and discerned as an object of
consciousness." On this passage Mr. Mill remarks, "Can a writer be
serious who bids us conjure up a conception of something which possesses
infinitely all conflicting attributes, and because we cannot do this
without contradiction, would have us believe that there is a
contradiction in the idea of infinite goodness or infinite wisdom?" The
answer to this criticism is very simple. The argument is not employed for
the purpose which Mr. Mill supposes. It is employed to show that the
metaphysical notion of the absolute-infinite, as the sum, potential or
actual, of all possible existence, is inconceivable under the laws of
human consciousness; and thus that the absolutely first existence,
related to nothing and limited by nothing, the _ens realissimum_ of the
older philosophers, the _pure being_ of the Hegelians, cannot be attained
as a starting-point from which to deduce all relative and derived
existence. How far the empirical conception of certain mental attributes,
such as goodness or wisdom, derived in the first instance from our own
personal consciousness, can be positively conceived as extended to
infinity, is considered in a separate argument, which Mr. Mill does not
notice.

Mr. Mill continues, "Instead of 'the Infinite,' substitute 'an infinitely
good Being' [_i.e._, substitute what is not intended], and Mr. Mansel's
argument reads thus:--'If there is anything which an infinitely good
Being cannot become--if he cannot become bad--that is a limitation, and
the goodness cannot be infinite. If there is anything which an infinitely
good Being actually is (namely, good), he is excluded from being any
other thing, as being wise or powerful.'" To the first part of this
objection we reply by simply asking, "Is becoming bad a 'higher
perfection?'" To the second part we reply by Mr. Mill's favourite mode of
reasoning--a parallel case. A writer asserts that a creature which is a
horse is thereby excluded from being a dog; and that, in so far as it has
the nature of a horse, it has not the nature of a dog. "What!" exclaims
Mr. Mill, "is it not the nature of a dog to have four legs? and does the
man mean to say that a horse has not four legs?" We venture respectfully
to ask Mr. M