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
phrases,--'The Infinite' and 'The Absolute.'" So profound and friendly
a thinker as the late Mr. Grote held this raising of the veil
inexpedient, but he proved, by a mistake he fell into, the necessity
of looking at the matter in the concrete. He acknowledged the force of
Mr. Mill's argument, that "The Infinite" must include "a farrago of
contradictions;" but so also, he said, does the Finite. Now
undoubtedly finite things, taken distributively, have contradictory
attributes, but not as a class. Still less is there any one individual
thing, "The Finite," in which these contradictory attributes inhere.
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