PHILOSOPHY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 211 



But it was Sir William Hamilton and John Stuart Mill whose 

 thoughts exercised a more powerful formative influence over the 

 minds of the younger men. The one was the flower of the Scottish 

 Realism, the other of the movement started by Bentham and the 

 elder Mill. 



That the Scottish Realism should end by such a combination 

 with the skepticism of the critical philosophy as is implied in Ham- 

 ilton's law of the relativity of all knowledge, is one of the most 

 curious and interesting turns in the history of modern philosophy. 

 And when this law was so interpreted by Dean Mansel in its appli- 

 cation to the fundamental cognitions of religion as to lay the founda- 

 tions upon which the most imposing structure of agnosticism was 

 built by Herbert Spencer, surely the entire swing around the circle, 

 from Kant to Kant again, has been made complete. The attempt of 

 Hamilton failed, as every similar attempt must always fail. Neither 

 speculative philosophy nor religious faith is satisfied with an ab- 

 stract conception, about the correlate of which in Reality nothing 

 is known or ever can be known. But every important attempt of 

 this sort serves the double purpose of stimulating other efforts to 

 reconstruct the answer to the problem of philosophy, on a basis of 

 positive experience of an enlarged type; and also of acting as a real, 

 if only temporary practical support to certain value- judgments 

 which the faiths of morality, art, and religion both implicate and, 

 in a measure, validate. 



The influence of John Stuart Mill, as it was exerted not only in 

 his conduct of life while a servant of the East India Company, but 

 also in his writings on Logic, Politics, and Philosophy, was, on the 

 whole, a valuable contribution to his generation. In the additions 

 which he made to the Utilitarianism of Bentham we have done, I 

 believe, all that ever can be done in defense of this principle of ethics. 

 And his posthumous confessions of faith in the ontological value of 

 certain great conceptions of religion are the more valuable because of 

 the nature of the man, and of the experience which is their source. 

 Perhaps the most permanent contribution which Mill made to the 

 development of philosophy proper, outside of the sphere of logic, 

 ethics, and politics, was his vigorous polemical criticism of Hamil- 

 ton's claim for the necessity of faith in an "Unconditioned" whose 

 conception is "only a fasciculus of negations of the Conditioned in 

 its opposite extremes, and bound together merely by the aid of 

 language and their common character of incomprehensibility." 



The history of the development of philosophy in America during 

 the nineteenth century, as during the preceding century, has been 

 characterized in the main by three principal tendencies. These 

 may be called the theological, the social, and the eclectic. From 

 the beginning down to the present time the religious influence and 



