Or the conclusions which, in the 'Secret of Hegel,' I was occasionally led to express in reference to the teachings of Sir William Hamilton, I now produce the Deduction. Written before the work named (it was written in 1862, and is now re-written principally for the sake of condensation, and always and only from the original materials), this deduction rose from the necessity to examine the productions of my predecessors in the field of German thought. Of these, before this examination, Sir William Hamilton was to me, so to speak, virgin-ground: I had heard of him, but I had not read a single word he had written. I believed what I had heard, nevertheless, and, so believing, approached him-a countryman of my own-with no expectation, no wish, no thought, but to find all that I had heard true. Nor, in a certain sense, did the event prove otherwise: Sir William Hamilton showed at once as a man of infinite acquirement, infinite ability. In a certain other sense, however, the event did prove otherwise, and my expectations were disappointed.

It is to be said, at the same time, that the surprise at my own results, together with the resistance to these results which I met with at the hands of two of Sir William Hamilton's most competent and admiring students, in whose society the relative study was pretty much carried on, threw me so often back on the duty of re-investigation that, in the end, it was impossible for me longer to doubt the truth of my own conclusions.

This deduction is divided into four parts: I. The philosophy of perception, containing as subsections under it—1. Hamilton both presentationist and phenomenalist; 2. The testimony of consciousness, or Hamilton's or; 3. The analysis of philosophy, or Hamilton's dióri; and 4. The principle of common sense: II. The philosophy of the conditioned, containing as subsections under it-1. The absolute; 2. Hamilton's knowledge of Kant and Hegel; and 3. The law of the conditioned: III. Logic; and, IV. A general conclusion.

Of these parts, I publish now only the first ; amounting, perhaps, to about a third of the whole. This part, however, is, so far as Hamilton's activity is concerned, the most important. It will, of itself, probably, suffice to justify, on the whole, the conclusions spoken of as already before the public; and it is

solely with a view to this justification that it is published. The other parts are, for the present, suppressed, in submission to the temper of the time, and in consideration of the intervention, on the same subject, and, as I understand, with similar results, of my more distinguished contemporary, Mr. Mill.

I am sensible, at the same time, that this partial publication is, in every point of view but the one indicated, unjust to myself. I seem to myself to have discovered in Hamilton a certain vein of disingenuousness that, cruelly unjust to individuals, has probably caused the retardation of general British philosophy by, perhaps, a generation; and it is the remaining parts of my deduction that are, after all, the best fitted to demonstrate this, and establish grounds for any indignation which I may have been consequently led to express-though without the slightest ill-will, of which, indeed, however adverse to the mischievous. vein concerned, I am entirely unconscious. Really, grown men, already gray with work, do not take boyish hatreds at what they examine for the first time then, and in general interests. Nay, many of the averments in question occur in those provisional Notes that were intended, in the first instance, for no eye but my own, and arise, therefore, from a man who, in presence only of a scientific fact, feels himself as free in its regard from passion or prejudice as the air that embraces it, or the light that records it.

Such reasons for regret, then, are not wanting as regards the parts withheld, and certainly, too, there may be something in the exhaustive discussion of all that Hamilton has anywhere said of the Germans (part ii. 2) calculated to be of advantage, and give information, at present. As it is, however, I believe I act for the best in publishing, in the meantime, only the philosophy of perception.