han perfect. There are
not infinite degrees of right. The will is either entirely right,
or wrong in different degrees."--(P. 35.)

Surely, whatever Divine power can do, Divine knowledge can know as
possible to be done. The one, therefore, must be as infinite as the
other. And what of Divine goodness? An angel or a glorified saint is
absolutely good in Mr. Mill's sense of the term. His "will is entirely
right." Does Mr. Mill mean to say that there is no difference, even in
degree, between the goodness of God and that of one of His creatures?
But, even supposing his statement to be true, how is it relevant to the
matter under discussion? Can Mr. Mill possibly be ignorant that all these
attributes are relations; that the Absolute in Hamilton's sense, "the
unconditionally limited," is not predicable of God at all; and that when
divines and philosophers speak of the absolute nature of God, they mean a
nature in which there is no distinction of attributes at all?

Mr. Mill then proceeds to give a summary of Hamilton's arguments against
Cousin, preparatory to refuting them. In the course of this summary he
says:--

"Let me ask, _en passant_, where is the necessity for supposing
that, if the Absolute, or, to speak plainly, if God, is only known
to us in the character of a cause, he must therefore 'exist merely
as a cause,' and be merely 'a mean towards an end?' It is surely
possible to maintain that the Deity is known to us only as he who
feeds the ravens, without supposing that the Divine Intelligence
exists solely in order that the ravens may be fed."[AN]--(P.
42.)

[AN] In a note to this passage, Mr. Mill makes some sarcastic
comments on an argument of Hamilton's against Cousin's
theory that God is necessarily determined to create. "On
this hypothesis," says Hamilton, "God, as necessarily
determined to pass from absolute essence to relative
manifestation, is determined to pass either from the
better to the worse, or from the worse to the better."
Mr. Mill calls this argument "a curiosity of
dialectics," and answers, "Perfect wisdom would have
begun to will the new state at the precise moment when
it began to be better than the old." Hamilton is not
speaking of states of things, but of states of the
Divine nature, as creative or not creative; and Mr.
Mill's argument, to refute Hamilton, must suppose a time