concur with it. He has brought the matter to a direct issue, by weighing
Sir W. Hamilton in the balance against two other actual cotemporaries;
instead of comparing him with some unrealized ideal found only in the
fancy of critics and reviewers.

Comparing Sir W. Hamilton with Dr Brown, we cordially subscribe to the
opinion of Mr Mill. We think that Dr Brown has 'done far greater
service to the world than Sir W. Hamilton, in the origination and
diffusion of important thought.' To speak only of two chief subjects in
the field of important thought--Causality and the Freedom of the
Will--we not only adopt the conclusions of Dr Brown, but we admire both
his acuteness and his originality in vindicating and illustrating the
first of the two, while we dissent entirely from the views of Sir W.
Hamilton. This alone would be sufficient to make us approve the
superiority assigned by Mr Mill to Dr Brown. We discover no compensating
item to be placed to the credit of Sir W. Hamilton: for the great
doctrine of the Relativity of Knowledge, which is our chief point of
philosophical brotherhood with him, was maintained by Brown also.

But in regard to Dr Whately, our judgment is altogether different. We
cannot consent to admit him as a superior, or even as an equal, to Sir
W. Hamilton, 'in the origination and diffusion of important thought.' He
did much service by reviving an inclination and respect for Logic, and
by clearing up a part of the technical obscurity which surrounded it:
but we look upon him as an acute and liberal-minded English theologian,
enlarging usefully, though timidly, the intellectual prison in which
many orthodox minds are confined--rather than as a fit aspirant to the
cosmopolitan honours of philosophy. 'An active and fertile thinker,' Mr
Mill calls Whately; and such he undoubtedly was. But such also we
consider Sir W. Hamilton to have been in a degree, at least equal. If