stretch of attention. Mr Mill gives his readers no superfluous
sentences, scarcely even a superfluous word, above what is necessary to
express his meaning briefly and clearly. Of such a book no complete
abstract can be given in the space to which we are confined.

To students of philosophy--doubtless but a minority among the general
circle of English readers--this work comes recommended by the strongest
claims both of interest and instruction. It presents in direct
antithesis two most conspicuous representatives of the modern
speculative mind of England--Sir W. Hamilton and Mr John Stuart Mill.

Sir W. Hamilton has exercised powerful influence over the stream of
thought during the present generation. The lectures on Logic and
Metaphysics delivered by him at Edinburgh, for twenty years, determined
the view taken of those subjects by a large number of aspiring young
students, and determined that view for many of them permanently and
irrevocably.[1] Several eminent teachers and writers of the present day
are proud of considering themselves his disciples, enunciate his
doctrines in greater or less proportion, and seldom contradict him
without letting it be seen that they depart unwillingly from such a
leader. Various new phrases and psychological illustrations have
obtained footing in treatises of philosophy, chiefly from his authority.
We do not number ourselves among his followers; but we think his
influence on philosophy was in many ways beneficial. He kept up the idea
of philosophy as a subject to be studied from its own points of view: a
dignity which in earlier times it enjoyed, perhaps, to mischievous
excess, but from which in recent times it has far too much
receded--especially in England. He performed the great service of
labouring strenuously to piece together the past traditions of
philosophy, to re-discover those which had been allowed to drop into