This Mr. Mill actually gives as a reason for pursuing the _a priori_ method. But, in our judgment, the very circumstances which he mentions irresistibly prove that the _a priori_ method is altogether unfit for investigations of this kind, and that the only way to arrive at the truth is by induction. _Experience_ can never be divided, or even appear to be divided, except with reference to some hypothesis. When we say that one fact is inconsistent with another fact, we mean only that it is inconsistent with _the theory_ which we have founded on that other fact. But, if the fact be certain, the unavoidable conclusion is that our theory is false; and, in order to correct it, we must reason back from an enlarged collection of facts to principles. Now here we have two governments which, by Mr. Mill’s own account, come under the same head in his _theoretical_ classification. It is evident, therefore, that, {10}by reasoning on that theoretical classification, we shall be brought to the conclusion that these two forms of government must produce the same effects. But Mr. Mill himself tells us that they do not produce the same effects. Hence he infers that the only way to get at truth is to place implicit confidence in that chain of proof _a priori_ from which it appears that they must produce the same effects! To believe at once in a theory and in a fact which contradicts it is an exercise of faith sufficiently hard: but to believe in a theory _because_ a fact contradicts it is what neither philosopher nor pope ever before required. This, however, is what Mr. Mill demands of us. He seems to think that, if all despots, without exception, governed ill, it would be unnecessary to prove, by a synthetical argument, what would then be sufficiently clear from experience. But, as some despots will be so perverse as to govern well, he finds himself compelled to prove the impossibility of their governing well by that synthetical argument which would have been superfluous had not the facts contradicted it. He reasons _a priori_, because the phenomena are not what, by reasoning _a priori_, he will prove them to be. In other words, he reasons _a priori_, because, by so reasoning, he is certain to arrive at a false conclusion! In the course of the examination to which we propose to subject the speculations of Mr. Mill we shall have to notice many other curious instances of that turn of mind which the passage above quoted indicates.