me
purely philosophical. He had inherited from his father not merely the
theoretical exaltation of liberty (except in the philosophical sense)
which characterised eighteenth century philosophers, but also that
arrogant and pragmatical impatience of the supernatural which was to a
still greater extent that century's characteristic. The arrogance and
the pragmaticality changed in John Stuart Mill's milder nature to a sort
of nervous dread of admitting even the possibility of things not
numerable, ponderable, and measurable; and it may be observed with
amusement that for the usual division of logic into Deductive and
Inductive he substituted _Ratiocinative_ for the first member, so as not
even by implication to admit the possibility of deduction from any
principles not inductively given. So, too, later, in his _Examination
of Sir William Hamilton_, between the opposing spectres of Realism and
Idealism, he was driven to take refuge in what he called "permanent
possibilities" of Sensation, though logicians vainly asked how he
assured himself of the permanence, and jesters rudely observed that to
call a bottle of gin a "permanent possibility of drunkenness" was an
unnecessary complication of language for a very small end or meaning.
His great philosophical weapon (borrowed from though of course not
invented by his father) was the Association of Ideas, just as his clue
in political economy was in the main though not exclusively
_laissez-faire_, in ethics a modified utilitarianism, and in politics an
absolute deference to, tempered by a resigned distrust of, the majority.
The defect in a higher and more architectonic theory of the world with
which he has been charged is not quite justly chargeable, for from his
point of view no such theory was possible.

Even those, however, who, as the present writer acknowledges in his own
case, are totally opposed to the whole Millian conception of logic and
politics, of metaphysics and morality, must, unless prejudiced, admit
his great merits of method and treatment. He not only very seldom
smuggles in sophistry into the middle of his arguments, but even
paralogisms are not common with him; it is with his premises, not with
his conclusions, that you must deal if you wish to upset him. Unlike
most contemners of formal logic, he is not in much danger, as far as his
merely dialectic processes go, from formal logic itself; and it is in
the arbitrary and partial character of his preliminary admi