opensities of human nature are assumed;
and from these premises the whole science of politics is synthetically
deduced! We can scarcely persuade ourselves that we are not reading a
book written before the time of Bacon and Galileo,--a book written in
those days in which physicians reasoned from the nature of heat to the
treatment of fever, and astronomers proved syllogistically that the
planets could have no independent motion,--because the heavens were
incorruptible, and nature abhorred a vacuum!

The reason, too, which Mr Mill has assigned for taking this course
strikes us as most extraordinary.

"Experience," says he, "if we look only at the outside of the facts,
appears to be DIVIDED on this subject. Absolute monarchy, under Neros
and Caligulas, under such men as the Emperors of Morocco and Sultans of
Turkey, is the scourge of human nature. On the other side, the people of
Denmark, tired out with the oppression of an aristocracy, resolved that
their king should be absolute; and, under their absolute monarch, are as
well governed as any people in Europe."

This Mr Mill actually gives as a reason for pursuing the a priori
method. But, in our judgment, the very circumstances which he mentions
irresistibly prove that the a priori method is altogether unfit for
investigations of this kind, and that the only way to arrive at the
truth is by induction. EXPERIENCE can never be divided, or even appear
to be divided, except with reference to some hypothesis. When we say
that one fact is inconsistent with another fact, we mean only that it is
inconsistent with THE THEORY which we have founded on that other fact.
But, if the fact be certain, the unavoidable conclusion is that our
theory is false; and, in order to correct it, we must reason back from
an enlarged collection of facts to principles.

Now here we have two governments which, by Mr Mill's own account, come
under the same head in his THEORETICAL classification. It is evident,
therefore, that, by reasoning on that theoretical classification, we
shall be brought to the conclusion that these two forms of government
must produce the same effects. But Mr Mill himself tells us that they do
not produce the same effects. Hence he infers that the only way to get
at truth is to place implicit confidence in that chain of proof a
priori from which it appears that they must produce the same effects!
To believe at once in a theory and in a fact which contradicts it is an
exercis