w, or the train of thought by
which it suggested itself to his mind. And the result of this is, that
Mr. Mill's interpretations are generally in the potential mood. He wastes
a good deal of conjecture in discovering what Hamilton might have meant,
when a little attention in the right quarter would have shown what he did
mean.

[AW] Mr. Mill does not expressly name Schelling in this
sentence: but he does so shortly afterwards; and his
remark is of the same character with the previous one.
"Even Schelling," he says, "was not so gratuitously
absurd as to deny that the Absolute must be known
according to the capacities of that which knows
it--though he was forced to invent a special capacity
for the purpose." But if this capacity is an "invention"
of Schelling's, and if he was "forced" to invent it,
Hamilton's point is proved. To think, according to all
the real operations of thought which consciousness makes
known to us, is to condition. And the faculty of the
unconditioned is an invention of Schelling's, not known
to consciousness. In other words: all our real faculties
bear witness to the truth of Hamilton's statement; and
the only way of controverting it is to invent an
imaginary faculty for the purpose.

The third feature of Hamilton's philosophy which we charged Mr. Mill with
misunderstanding, is the distinction between Knowledge and Belief. In the
early part of this article, we endeavoured to explain the true nature of
this distinction; we have now only a very limited space to notice Mr.
Mill's criticisms on it. Hamilton, he says, admitted "a second source of
intellectual conviction called Belief." Now Belief is not a "source" of
any conviction, but the conviction itself. No man would say that he is
convinced of the truth of a proposition _because_ he believes it; his
belief in its truth is the same thing as his conviction of its truth.
Belief, then, is not a source of conviction, but a conviction having
sources of its own. The question is, have we legitimate sources of
conviction, distinct from those which constitute Knowledge properly so
called? Now here it should be remembered that the distinction is not one
invented by Hamilton to meet the exigencies of his own system. He
enumerates as many as twenty-two authors, of the most various schools of
philosophy, who all acknowledged it before him. Such a