cluded under the same formulae
of empirical generalization. He thus makes man the slave, and not the
master of nature; passively carried along in the current of successive
phenomena; unable, by any act of free will, to arrest a single wave in
its course, or to divert it from its ordained direction.

[U] That this is the real battle-ground between the two
philosophers is virtually admitted by Mr. Mill himself
at the end of his criticism. He says:--"The whole
philosophy of Sir W. Hamilton seems to have had its
character determined by the requirements of the doctrine
of Free-will; and to that doctrine he clung, because he
had persuaded himself that it afforded the only premises
from which human reason could deduce the doctrines of
natural religion. I believe that in this persuasion he
was thoroughly his own dupe, and that his speculations
have weakened the philosophical foundation of religion
fully as much as they have confirmed it."--P. 549. Mr.
Mill's whole philosophy, on the other hand, is
determined by the requirements of the doctrine of
Necessity; and to that doctrine he intrepidly adheres,
in utter defiance of consciousness, and sometimes of his
own consistency. Which of the two philosophers is really
"his own dupe," Mr. Mill in believing that morality and
religion can exist without free will--that a necessary
agent can be responsible for his acts--or Sir W.
Hamilton in maintaining the contrary, is a question
which the former has by no means satisfactorily settled
in his own favour.

[V] Hamilton, _Lectures_, vol. i, p. 29.

This diametrical antagonism between the two philosophers is not limited
to their first principles, but extends, as might naturally be expected,
to every subordinate science of which the immediate object is mental, and
not material. Logic, instead of being, as Sir W. Hamilton regards it, an
_a priori_ science of the necessary laws of thought, is with Mr. Mill a
science of observation, investigating those operations of the
understanding which are subservient to the estimation of evidence.[W]
The axioms of Mathematics, which the former philosopher regards, with
Kant, as necessary thoughts, based on the _a priori_ intuitions of space
and time, the latter[X] declares to be "experimental truths;
generalizations from observation." Psychology