xi Mill and Comte. 217 



perceive the world around it? Berkeley, I believe, 

 would have replied that the existence of all these 

 consists in being perceived and known by God. But 

 though I am a convinced Theist, this appears to me 

 totally unsatisfactory, unless we are to maintain that 

 God perceives objects in the same way that we do ; 

 which would be absurd; for the Divine knowledge 

 of things is immediate, while ours is the result of a 

 process in the complex apparatus of the organs of 

 sense, and of the nerves and the ganglionic substance 

 of the brain. I am confirmed in the belief that this 

 argument against Berkeleyanism is of some weight, 

 by the fact that Mill, whose metaphysical acuteness 

 will not be questioned, appears to have endeavoured 

 to reply to it by anticipation. I refer to his 

 attempt to get rid of the theory of a luminiferous 

 ether in which the waves of light are formed ; he 

 called it a mere metaphysical figment. Mill was 

 influenced in this great error by a thinker far inferior 

 to himself in depth, namely Auguste Comte, whose 

 hatred of everything that he labelled as metaphysical 

 amounted to fanaticism. 



We share the knowledge of the self and of the 

 external world with the higher animals ; but with 

 the specially human power of directing thought at 

 will, a third element enters into knowledge ; namely, 

 a sense of something which underlies and transcends 

 both the self and the external world ; something 

 which is infinite as opposed to their finitude, change- 



