BLACKWOOD'S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

No. CCCXXXVI. OCTOBER, 1843. Vol. LIV.

CONTENTS.

MILL'S LOGIC.[1]

These are not degenerate days. We have still strong thinkers amongst us; men of untiring perseverance, who flinch before no difficulties, who never hide the knot which their readers are only too willing that they should let alone; men who dare write what the ninety-nine out of every hundred will pronounce a dry book; who pledge themselves, not to the public, but to their subject, and will not desert it till their task is completed. One of this order is Mr John Stuart Mill. The work he has now presented to the public, we deem to be, after its kind, of the very highest character, every where displaying powers of clear, patient, indefatigable thinking. Abstract enough it must be allowed to be, calling for an unremitted attention, and yielding but little, even in the shape of illustration, of lighter and more amusing matter; he has taken no pains to bestow upon it any other interest than what searching thought and lucid views, aptly expressed, ought of themselves to create. His subject, indeed—the laws by which human belief and the inquisition of truth are to be governed and directed—is both of that extensive and fundamental character, that it would be treated with success only by one who knew how to resist the temptations to digress, as well as how to apply himself with vigour to the solution of the various questions that must rise before him.