re resemblance between
pain, pleasure, motives, etc., and substantia, generatio, corruptio,
elementum, materia,--than between lines angles, magnitudes, etc., and
the same."

It would perhaps be unreasonable to expect that a writer who cannot
understand his own English should understand Lord Bacon's Latin. We will
therefore attempt to make our meaning clearer.

What Lord Bacon blames in the schoolmen of his time is this,--that
they reasoned syllogistically on words which had not been defined with
precision; such as moist, dry, generation, corruption, and so forth.
Mr Mill's error is exactly of the same kind. He reasons syllogistically
about power, pleasure, and pain, without attaching any definite notion
to any one of those words. There is no more resemblance, says the
Westminster Reviewer, between pain and substantia than between pain and
a line or an angle. By his permission, in the very point to which
Lord Bacon's observation applies, Mr Mill's subjects do resemble the
substantia and elementum of the schoolmen and differ from the lines and
magnitudes of Euclid. We can reason a priori on mathematics, because
we can define with an exactitude which precludes all possibility of
confusion. If a mathematician were to admit the least laxity into his
notions, if he were to allow himself to be deluded by the vague sense
which words bear in popular use, or by the aspect of an ill-drawn
diagram, if he were to forget in his reasonings that a point was
indivisible, or that the definition of a line excluded breadth,
there would be no end to his blunders. The schoolmen tried to reason
mathematically about things which had not been, and perhaps could not
be, defined with mathematical accuracy. We know the result. Mr Mill has
in our time attempted to do the same. He talks of power, for example, as
if the meaning of the word power were as determinate as the meaning of
the word circle. But, when we analyse his speculations, we find that
his notion of power is, in the words of Bacon, "phantiastica et male
terminata."

There are two senses in which we may use the word "power," and those
words which denote the various distributions of power, as, for example,
"monarchy":--the one sense popular and superficial, the other more
scientific and accurate. Mr Mill, since he chose to reason a priori,
ought to have clearly pointed out in which sense he intended to use
words of this kind, and to have adhered inflexibly to the sense on which
he fi