But in regard to Dr Whately, our judgment is altogether different.  We cannot consent to admit him as a superior, or even as an equal, to Sir W. Hamilton, ‘in the origination and diffusion of important thought.’  He did much service by reviving an inclination and respect for Logic, and by clearing up a part of the technical obscurity which surrounded it:  but we look upon him as an acute and liberal-minded English theologian, enlarging usefully, though timidly, the intellectual prison in which many orthodox minds are confined—­rather than as a fit aspirant to the cosmopolitan honours of philosophy.  ‘An active and fertile thinker,’ Mr Mill calls Whately; and such he undoubtedly was.  But such also we consider Sir W. Hamilton to have been in a degree, at least equal.  If the sentence which we have quoted above be intended to deny the predicate, ‘active and fertile thinker,’ of Sir W. Hamilton, we cannot acquiesce in it.  His intellect appears to us thoroughly active and fertile, even when we dissent from his reasonings—­nay, even in the midst of his inconsistencies, when a new growth of opinions is unexpectedly pushed up on ground which we supposed to be already pre-occupied by another both older and different.  And we find this same judgment implied in the discriminating remarks upon his philosophical procedure made by Mr Mill himself—­(pp. 271, 272).  For example, respecting Causality and the Freedom of the Will, we detect no want of activity and fertility, though marked evidence of other defects—­especially the unconditional surrender of a powerful mind to certain privileged inspirations, worshipped as ‘necessities of thought.’

While thus declaring how far we concur in the parallel here drawn of Sir W. Hamilton with Brown and Whately, we must at the same time add that the comparison is taken under circumstances unduly favourable to these two last.  There has been no exposure of their errors and inconsistencies, equal in penetration and completeness to the crushing volume which Mr Mill has devoted to Sir W. Hamilton.  To make the odds fair, he ought to furnish a similar systematic examination to Brown and Whately; enabling us to read their works (as we now do those of Sir W. Hamilton) with the advantage of his unrivalled microscope, which detects the minutest breach or incoherence in the tissue of reasoning—­and of his large command of philosophical premisses, which brings into full notice what the author had overlooked.  Thus alone could the competition between the three be rendered perfectly fair.

We regret, as Mr Mill does, that Sir W. Hamilton did not undertake the composition of a history of philosophy.  Nevertheless we must confess that we should hardly feel such regret, if we could see evidence to warrant Mr Mill’s judgment (p. 554) that Sir W. Hamilton was ’indifferent to the [Greek:  dihoti] of a man’s opinions, and that he was incompetent to draw up an estimate of the opinions of any great thinker,’ &c.  Such incompetence, if proved