Reason and Redemption [pp. 409-437]

434 REASON AND REDEMPTION. [July,
few reservations) "the backbone of the whole system." The
scientific pretensions of Comte have not been affected by such
almost unavoidable errors as the one recently exposed by the
Rev. Professor Jellett, in his opening address before the mathematicians at Belfast,* but have been seriously shaken, if not
demolished, by the strictures of Mill, those of Mr. Huxley (in
his Lay Scrmons), and those of Mr. Herbert Spencer,~ and other
competent critics. The three successive states of human progress, though acquiesced in by the historian Grote, and under
other names by Mill, have been repudiated by Huxley and
others of that school; and Comte's hierarchy of the sciences
has given place in high quarters to new and better adjustments.
It is extremely difficult to know where to place Mr. J. S.
Mill. He expresses himself as "agreeing in the opinion that
what we know of Noumena, or things in themselves, is the
bare fact of their existence.'`~ Yet we find him also holding
language like this: "If things have an inmost nature, apart
not only from the impressions which they produce, but from
all those which they are fitted to produce, on any sentient being, this inmost nature is unknowable, inscrutable, and inconceivable, not to us merely, but to every other creature. To
say that even the Creator could know it, is to use language
which has no meaning, because we have no faculties by wbich
to apprehend that there is anything for him to know." The
only "things in themselves," therefore, which Mill acknowledged, were (as he elsewhere puts it) "permanent possibilities
of sensations,"~ and "permanent possibilities of feelings."'\
* See iVature, for August 20, 1874, p. 323: Address bef@re the "Mathematical
and Physical Section."
t For the criticisms of Mill and Spencer, see Conzte and Positivi~m. For Comte's
absurd views, as to binary combinations in Chemistry, see the proof given on
p. 60, and for some of his strange notions on Light, Psychology, and Phrenology,
pp. 62, 63, and 65.
~ See Examination of Sir W. Hamilton; London, Third Edition, p. Ii.
~ Ibid, chap. xi. He means objective certainties (respecting future sensations),
that are not absolutely, but conditionally, such. The illustration from the Island of
Madagascar makes this plain.
~ Ibid, chap. xi, and especially p. 242. Prof. Masson styles Mill's scheme one
of" Empirical Cogitationism," or of "Empirical Idealism." See Recent Brttisk
fhilosoph~', p. 405, etc.