diction of logic in temporal affairs. To every section
of Churchmen the relegation of moral sanctions within the domain of
verifiable consequences was a doctrine to be resisted strenuously.
With the high sacerdotalist it amounted to a denial of the Christian
mysteries; to the Broad Churchman it was ethically inadequate and
ignoble; to the scholastic professor of divinity it meant ruinous
materialism.

That a vigorous thinker should have begun by striking at what seemed
to him the root of obstructive fallacies was natural enough. He
supposed that a logical demonstration would clear the ground for his
plans of reform; whereas, on the contrary, it entangled him in
preliminary disputations, and his inflexible reasoning alarmed people
who followed experience as the guide of life, but instinctively felt
that there must be something beyond phenomenal existence. In political
economy Mill relied upon common sense and practice in affairs to make
the requisite allowance for general laws founded on human propensities
regarded abstractedly. His conviction was, in short, that nothing
should be taken for granted because everything might be explained; and
he desired to tie men down to accepting no belief, or even feeling,
that could not be justified by reason. His _System of Logic_ was, as
he has himself written, a text-book for the doctrine 'which derives
all knowledge from experience, and all moral and intellectual
qualities principally from the direction given to the associations.'
When he proceeded to construct a systematic psychology upon this
basis, he fell into the fundamental perplexities that are concisely
brought out by Mr. Stephen in his scrutiny of Mill's doctrine of
Causation. He followed Hume in severing any necessary connection
between cause and effect, and even invariable sequence became
incapable of proof. But when he resolved Cause into a statement of
existing conditions that can never be completely known until we have
mastered the whole series of physical phenomena, and showed that all
human induction is fallible because necessarily imperfect, it became
clear that Mill had very little to offer in substitution for those
grounds of ordinary belief that he was bent on demolishing. The word
Cause is reduced, for ordinary use, to a signification not unlike that
which is understood in loose popular language by the word Chance,
since Chance means no more than ignorance of how an event came to
pass; and in no case, accordin