o be, to devote the greater
portion of my article to an exposition and vindication of Sir W.
Hamilton's teaching; and, in the additional remarks which it was
necessary to make on the more personal part of the controversy, to speak
of myself in the third person, as I should have spoken of any other
writer. The form thus adopted has been retained in the present
republication, though the article now appears with the name of its
author.

My original intention of writing a review of the entire book was
necessarily abandoned as soon as I became acquainted with its contents.
To have done justice to the whole subject, or to Mr. Mill's treatment of
it, would have required a volume nearly as large as his own. I therefore
determined to confine myself to the _Philosophy of the Conditioned_, both
as the most original and important portion of Sir W. Hamilton's teaching,
and as that which occupies the first place in Mr. Mill's _Examination_.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE CONDITIONED.

The reader of Plato's _Republic_ will readily recall to mind that
wonderful passage at the end of the sixth book, in which the philosopher,
under the image of geometrical lines, exhibits the various relations of
the intelligible to the sensible world; especially his lofty aspirations
with regard to "that second segment of the intelligible world, which
reason of itself grasps by the power of dialectic, employing hypotheses,
not as principles, but as veritable hypotheses, that is to say, as steps
and starting-points, in order that it may ascend _as far as the
unconditioned_ ([Greek: mechri tou anypothetou]), to the first principle
of the universe, and having grasped this, may then lay hold of the
principles next adjacent to it, and so go down to the end, using no
sensible aids whatever, but employing abstract forms throughout, and
terminating in forms."

This quotation is important for our present purpose in two ways. In the
first place, it may serve, at the outset of our remarks, to propitiate
those plain-spoken English critics who look upon new terms in philosophy
with the same suspicion with which Jack Cade regarded "a noun and a verb,
and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear," by
showing that the head and front of our offending, "the Unconditioned," is
no modern invention of Teutonic barbarism, but sanctioned even by the
Attic elegance of a Plato. And in the second place, it contains almost a
history in miniature of the hig