Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/532

 idea. Indeed, the exposition is too short for the theme; the reader is apt to be satisfied with the portable phrase "permanent possibility of sensation," which helps him to one vital part of the ease, but does not amount to a satisfactory equivalent for an external and independent world. There would have been more help in an expression dwelling upon the "common to all," in contrast with the "special to me," to use one of Ferrier's forms of phraseology. This ground of distinction is not left unnoticed by Mill, but it is simply mentioned.

His chapter on the application to our belief in the permanent existence of mind is, I think, even more subtile than the preceding on matter. The manner of disposing of Reid's difficulty about the existence of his fellow creatures is everything that I could wish. It is when, in the concluding paragraph, he lays down as final and inexplicable the belief in memory, that I am unable to agree with him. This position of his has been much dwelt upon by the thinkers opposed to him. It makes him appear, after all, to be a transcendentalist like themselves, differing only in degree. For myself, I never could see where his difficulty lay, or what moved him to say that the belief in memory is incomprehensible or essentially irresolvable. The precise nature of belief is no doubt invested with very peculiar delicacy, but whenever it shall be cleared up it may very fairly be capable of accounting for the belief that a certain state now past as a sensation, but present as an idea, was once a sensation, and is not a mere product of thought or imagination.—(Cf. "The Emotions and the Will," third edition, p. 532.)

I may make a passing observation on the chapter specially devoted to Mansel's "Limits of Religious Thought." It is a considerable digression in a work devoted to Hamilton, but Mansel's book touched Mill to the quick; in private, he called it a "loathsome" book. His combined argumentative and passionate style rises to its utmost height, Mansel sarcastically described his famous climax—"to hell I will go"—as an exhibition of taste and temper. That passage was scarcely what Grote called it, a Promethean defiance of Jove, inasmuch as the fear of hell never had a place in Mill's bosom; it was the strength of his feelings coining the strongest attainable image to give them vent.

Mill could not help adverting to Hamilton's very strong and paradoxical assertions about free-will; but, as he never elaborates a consecutive exposition of the question, I doubt the propriety of making these assertions a text for discussing it at full. Mill's chapter is either too much or too little; too much as regards his author, too little as regards the subject. The connection of punishment with free-will should be allowed only under protest; the legitimacy and the limits of punishment make a distinct inquiry. Punishment, psychologically viewed, assumes that men recoil from pain; there may be other springs of