Ibid., p. 42.
It is not surprising that this philosophy, when compared with that of a critic like Mr. Mill, should stand out in clear and sharp antagonism. Mr. Mill is one of the most distinguished representatives of that school of Materialism which Sir W. Hamilton denounces as virtual Atheism. We do not mean that he consciously adopts the grosser tenets of the materialists. We are not aware that he has ever positively denied the existence of a soul distinct from the body, or maintained that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile. But he is the advocate of a philosophical method which makes the belief in the existence of an immaterial principle superfluous and incongruous; he not only acknowledges no such distinction between the phenomena of mind and those of matter as to require the hypothesis of a free intelligence to account for it; he not only regards the ascertained laws of coexistence and succession in material phenomena as the type and rule according to which all phenomena whatever—those of internal consciousness no less than of external observation—are to be tested; but he even expressly denies the existence of that free will which Sir W. Hamilton regards as the indispensable condition of all morality and all religion.[U] Thus, instead of recognising in the facts of intelligence “an order of existence diametrically in contrast to that displayed to us in the facts of the material universe,”[V] he regards both classes of facts as of the same kind, and explicable by the same laws; he abolishes the primary contrast of consciousness between the ego and the non-ego—the person and the thing; he reduces man to a thing, instead of a person,—to one among the many phenomena of the universe, determined by the same laws of invariable antecedence and consequence, included under the same formulæ 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.
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.
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 à 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 à priori intuitions of space and time, the latter[X] declares to be “experimental truths; generalizations from observation.” Psychology, which with Hamilton is especially the philosophy of man as a free and personal agent, is with Mill the science of “the uniformities of succession; the laws, whether ultimate or derivative, according to which one mental state succeeds another.”[Y] And finally, in the place of Ethics, as the science of the à priori laws of man’s moral obligations, we are presented, in Mr. Mill’s system, with Ethology, the “science which determines the kind of character produced, in conformity to the general laws of mind, by any set of circumstances, physical and moral.”[Z]
Mill’s Logic. Introduction, § 7.