eiving it otherwise that we know it _must be_.
Mr. Herbert Spencer, too, holds that propositions whose negation is
inconceivable have "a higher warrant than any other whatever." It is
through this door that ontological belief was supposed to enter.
"Things in themselves" were to be believed in because we could not
help it. Modern Noumenalists agree that we can know nothing more of
"things in themselves" than their existence, but this they continue to
assert with a vehemence only equalled by its want of meaning.

In his "Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy," Mr. Mill
gives battle to this mode of thought. After reviewing, in an opening
chapter, the various views which have been held respecting the
relativity of human knowledge, and stating his own doctrine, he
proceeds to judge by this standard the philosophy of the absolute and
Sir William Hamilton's relation to it. The argument is really on the
question whether we have or have not an intuition of God, though, as
Mr. Mill says, "the name of God is veiled under two extremely abstract
phrases,--'The Infinite' and 'The Absolute.'" So profound and friendly
a thinker as the late Mr. Grote held this raising of the veil
inexpedient, but he proved, by a mistake he fell into, the necessity
of looking at the matter in the concrete. He acknowledged the force of
Mr. Mill's argument, that "The Infinite" must include "a farrago of
contradictions;" but so also, he said, does the Finite. Now
undoubtedly finite things, taken distributively, have contradictory
attributes, but not as a class. Still less is there any one individual
thing, "The Finite," in which these contradictory attributes inhere.
But it was against a corresponding being, "The Infinite," that Mr.
Mill was arguing. It is this that he calls a "fasciculus of
contradictions," and regarded as the _reductio ad absurdissimum_ of
the transcendental philosophy.

Mr. Mill's religious tendencies may very well be gathered from a
passage in his review of Auguste Comte, a philosopher with whom he
agreed on all points save those which are specially M. Comte's.
"Candid persons of all creeds may be willing to admit, that if a
person has an ideal object, his attachment and sense of duty towards
which are able to control and discipline all his other sentiments and
propensities, and prescribe to him a rule of life, that person has a
religion; and though every one naturally prefers his own religion to
any other, all must admit,