on philosophical subjects, his power of discussing himself, and of stimulating others to discuss, his ready responsive inspirations through all the shifts and windings of a sort of Platonic dialogue—­all these accomplishments were, to those who knew him, even more impressive than what he composed for the press.  Conversation with him was not merely instructive, but provocative to the dormant intelligence.  Of all persons whom we have known, Mr James Mill was one who stood least remote from the lofty Platonic ideal of Dialectic—­[Greek:  Tou didhonai kahi dhechesthai lhogon]—­(the giving and receiving of reasons) competent alike to examine others, or to be examined by them, on philosophy.  When to this we add a strenuous character, earnest convictions, and single-minded devotion to truth, with an utter disdain of mere paradox—­it may be conceived that such a man exercised powerful intellectual ascendancy over younger minds.  Several of those who enjoyed his society—­men now at, or past, the maturity of life, and some of them in distinguished positions—­remember and attest with gratitude such ascendancy in their own cases:  among them the writer of the present article, who owes to the historian of British India an amount of intellectual stimulus and guidance such as he can never forget.

When a father, such as we have described, declining to send his son either to school or college, constituted himself schoolmaster from the beginning, and performed that duty with laborious solicitude—­when, besides full infusion of modern knowledge, the forcing process applied by the Platonic Socrates to the youth-Theaetetus, was administered by Mr James Mill, continuously and from an earlier age, to a youthful mind not less pregnant than that of Theaetetus—­it would be surprising if the son thus trained had not reached even a higher eminence than his father.  The fruit borne by Mr John Stuart Mill has been worthy of the culture bestowed, and the volume before us is at once his latest and his ripest product.

The ‘Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy’ is intended by Mr Mill (so he tells us in the preface to the sixth published edition of his ‘System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive’) as a sequel and complement to that system.  We are happy to welcome so valuable an addition; but with or without that addition, the ‘System of Logic’ appears to us to present the most important advance in speculative theory which the present century has witnessed.  Either half of it, the Ratiocinative or the Inductive, would have surpassed any previous work on the same subject.  The Inductive half discriminates and brings into clear view, for the first time, those virtues of method which have insensibly grown into habits among consummate scientific inquirers of the post-Baconian age, as well as the fallacies by which some of these authors have been misled.  The Ratiocinative half, dealing with matters which had already been well handled by Dutrieu and other