t them out: an insistence upon
the insufficiency of Hume's or Condillac's theories was a most
valuable service; but it was valuable precisely because every
indication of such an unresolved element was a challenge to the next
comer to resolve it by closer analysis. And thus, in fact, the
intuitions, which had played so great a part with Reid, come in
Brown's hands to be so clearly limited to the materials given by
sensation or experience that any show of 'philosophy,' meaning an
independent theory of the universe, was an illusory combination of
fine phrases.[506]

II. JAMES MILL'S 'ANALYSIS'

James Mill's _Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind_ is on the
one hand an exposition of the principles implied in Bentham's
writings, and, on the other hand, a statement of the position from
which the younger Mill started. J. S. Mill discussed the book with his
father during its composition, and in 1869 he published a new edition,
with elaborate notes by himself, George Grote, Professor Bain, and
Andrew Findlater.[507] The commentary is of great importance in
defining the relation between the two successors to the throne of
Bentham.

Mill's _Analysis_, though not widely read, made a deep impression upon
Mill's own disciples. It is terse, trenchant, and uncompromising. It
reminds us in point of style of the French writers, with whom he
sympathised, rather than of the English predecessors, to whom much of
the substance was owing. The discursive rhetoric of Brown or Stewart
is replaced by good, hard, sinewy logic. The writer is plainly in
earnest. If over confident, he has no petty vanity, and at least
believes every word that he says. Certain limitations are at once
obvious. Mill, as a publicist, a historian, and a busy official, had
not had much time to spare for purely philosophic reading. He was not
a professor in want of a system, but an energetic man of business,
wishing to strike at the root of the superstitions to which his
political opponents appealed for support. He had heard of Kant, and
seen what 'the poor man would be at.' Later German systems, had he
heard of them, would have been summarily rejected by him as so much
transcendental moonshine. The problem of philosophy was, he held, a
very simple one, if attacked in a straightforward, scientific method.

Mill, like his Scottish rivals, applies 'Baconian' principles. The
inductive method, which had already been so fruitful in the physical
sciences, will be eq