(J9 
England, had no philosophy of its own, and no philosophic 
culture. There were neither principles of philosophy nor a 
philosophic discipline and training in our English Universities, 
whereby a student might be enabled to appreciate, to criti- 
cise, or to resist the assumptions and insinuations by means of 
which Mill undermined all positive faith in any principles 
either of philosophy or morals. Mill's sceptical phenomen- 
°l°gy, his denial of all realism, and all intuitions, moral or 
intellectual, was not directly taught ; not built up into a 
system, in which form its vast gaps and multiple, contradic- 
toriness must presently have become visible to all real 
thinkers, but was implicated by means of the covert postu- 
lates on which was founded the whole fabric of his work on 
Inductive Logic. It was thus conveyed into the system of his 
readers’ opinions, and into the habits of their critical thought, 
so that its principles were continually suggested as if they 
had been axioms. Thus a nihilistic scepticism, in which all 
principles of l’eligious faith, of morality, or indeed of belief in 
anything whatever as necessarily true or right, were resolved 
into mere fallacies, or at best utilitarian conventions, was 
diffused as a subtle poison into the life-blood of a whole 
generation of young Englishmen. Mill’s Logic, before they 
were aware, turned many of these men into sceptics of Hume’s 
school. After this they were prepared easily to accept 
George Henry Lewes — who, indeed, is a very able and, from 
his own point of view, a very honest historian and critic — 
as their historian of philosophy, and, under his hands, to 
become admirers of Comte and professors of the Positivist 
system of negations. Herbert Spencer, again, seemed to 
those who bad sat under Mill, to be a teacher of a higher 
order, though fundamentally of the same school. If he could 
not give them a substantial faith, he at least recognized the 
utterances of their consciousness and the struggles of their 
nature after a ground of reality. In some sort, indeed, his 
seemed to be a philosophy of realism, though of a very nebu- 
lous description ; and if he did not lead them back to God, he 
brought them within a dim and distant inkling of the inscrut- 
able mystery of the unknown and unknowable reality, in 
which subject and object darkly and eternally blend. They 
accordingly passed with some sense of gain from the school of 
Mill to the oracle of Herbert Spencer. He became their 
prophet. 
But such a philosophy as that of Mill, such a realism as 
that of Herbert Spencer, could not, cannot, endure for long. 
If our Universities had possessed living schools of philosophy, 
and a living succession of philosophers, such teachers could 
