OF KNOWLIJDGE. 381 



Conditioned. The Unconditioned, though it exists, is not 

 an object of knowledge, not even to the extent that 

 Kant conceived it to be — viz., as a limiting idea and 

 regulative principle. To accept it as such is, in Hamil- 

 ton's opinion, the great error of the Kantian philosophy, 

 which opened the door to the vagaries of Kant's suc- 

 cessors, who attempted to superimpose upon the ex- 

 isting knowledge of the Conditioned — i.e., upon the 

 only knowledge that is possible — a higher kind of 

 knowledge, the knowledge of the Unconditioned or 

 Absolute. Hamilton's criticisms are directed as much 

 against Schelling and Hegel and their pupil Victor 

 Cousin in France, as against that philosophy in England 

 which starts from the knowledge we possess in the 

 mathematical and physical sciences, and aims at penetrat- 

 ing by their methods into the region of mental and 

 moral phenomena, as Mill hoped to do. For, according 

 to Hamilton, our moral ideas are based upon the Un- 

 conditioned, which we approach only by faith, and upon 

 the idea of freedom, through which the human being is 

 elevated beyond the laws of a purely natural order. 



On a larger scale than Sir John Herschel had at- . _5--, 



"^ A, 0011116, 



tempted in England, an exposition of the leading ideas 

 and methods of tlie exact and natural sciences was 

 attempted about the same time by Auguste Comte in 

 France. In many respects the influences which 

 governed the early development of Comte's mind were 

 similar to those which made themselves felt in the case 

 of John Stuart Mill. Both had a precocious develop- 

 ment ; the ideas attained in childhood, which in the 

 ease of most, even of the great, thinkers are characterised 



