urther
inquiry may, perhaps, show to belong to God and to no other being, but
which do not in their signification express this, and do not constitute
our primary idea of God, which is that of a Person. Men may believe in an
absolute and infinite, without in any proper sense believing in God; and
thousands upon thousands of pious men have prayed to a personal God, who
have never heard of the absolute and the infinite, and who would not
understand the expressions if they heard them. But, in the second place,
"the absolute" and "the infinite," in Sir W. Hamilton's sense of the
terms, cannot both be names of God, for the simple reason that they are
contradictory of each other, and are proposed as alternatives which
cannot both be accepted as predicates of the same subject. For Hamilton,
whatever Mr. Mill may do, did not fall into the absurdity of maintaining
that God in some of His attributes is absolute without being infinite,
and in others is infinite without being absolute.[AL]

[AK] _Examination_, p. 32.

[AL] See _Examination_, p. 35.

But we have not yet done with this single paragraph. After thus making
two errors in his exposition of his opponent's doctrine, Mr. Mill
immediately proceeds to a third, in his criticism of it. By following his
"most unquestionable of all logical maxims," and substituting the name of
God in the place of "the Infinite" and "the Absolute," he exactly
reverses Sir W. Hamilton's argument, and makes his own attempted
refutation of it a glaring _ignoratio elenchi_.

One of the purposes of Hamilton's argument is to show that we have no
positive conception of an Infinite Being; that when we attempt to form
such a conception, we do but produce a distorted representation of the
finite; and hence, that our so-called conception of the infinite is not
the true infinite. Hence it is not to be wondered at--nay, it is a
natural consequence of this doctrine,--that our positive conception of
God as a Person cannot be included under this pseudo-concept of the
Infinite. Whereas Mr. Mill, by laying down the maxim that the meaning of
the abstract must be sought in the concrete, quietly assumes that this
pseudo-infinite is a proper predicate of God, to be tested by its
applicability to the subject, and that what Hamilton says of _this_
infinite cannot be true unless it is also true of God. Of this
refutation, Hamilton, were he living, might truly say, as he said of a
former criticism on another part of