method, its application, and the uprooting of prejudices which stood
in its way,--this was the task to which Mr. Mill applied himself with
an ability and success rarely matched and never surpassed.

The biggest lion in the path was the doctrine of so-called "necessary
truth." This doctrine was especially obnoxious to him, as it set up a
purely subjective standard of truth, and a standard--as he was easily
able to show--varying according to the psychological history of the
individual. Such thinkers as Dr. Whewell and Mr. Herbert Spencer had
to be met in intellectual combat. Dr. Whewell held, not that the
inconceivability of the contradictory of a proposition is a proof of
its truth co-equal with experience, but that its value transcends
experience. Experience may tell us what _is_; but it is by the
impossibility of conceiving it otherwise that we know it _must be_.
Mr. Herbert Spencer, too, holds that propositions whose negation is
inconceivable have "a higher warrant than any other whatever." It is
through this door that ontological belief was supposed to enter.
"Things in themselves" were to be believed in because we could not
help it. Modern Noumenalists agree that we can know nothing more of
"things in themselves" than their existence, but this they continue to
assert with a vehemence only equalled by its want of meaning.

In his "Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy," Mr. Mill
gives battle to this mode of thought. After reviewing, in an opening
chapter, the various views which have been held respecting the
relativity of human knowledge, and stating his own doctrine, he
proceeds to judge by this standard the philosophy of the absolute and
Sir William Hamilton's relation to it. The argument is really on the
question whether we have or have not an intuition of God, though, as
Mr. Mill says, "the name of God is veiled under two extremely abstract