If judged by what he denies, viz. the formal logic of Hamilton and Mansel, whose Aristotelian and scholastic learning did but accentuate their traditionalism, and whose acquiescence in consistency constituted in Mill's view a discouragement of research, such as men now incline to attribute at the least equally to Hume's idealism, Mill is only negatively justified. If judged by his positive contribution to the theory of method he may claim to find a more than negative justification for his teaching in its success. In the field covered by scholastic logic Mill is frankly associationist. He aims at describing what he finds given, without reference to insensible implications of doubtful validity and value. The upshot is a psychological account of what from one aspect is evidence, from the other, belief. So he explains "concepts or general notions"[117] by an abstraction which he represents as a sort of alt-relief operated by attention and fixed by naming, association with the name giving to a set of attributes a unity they otherwise lack. This is manifestly, when all is said, a particular psychological event, a collective fact of the associative consciousness. It can exercise no organizing or controlling function in knowledge. So again in determining the "import" of propositions, it is no accident that in all save existential propositions it is to the familiar rubrics of associationism--co-existence, sequence, causation and resemblance--that he refers for classification, while his general formula as to the conjunctions of connotations is associationist through and through. It follows consistently enough that inference is from particular to particular. Mill holds even the ideas of mathematics to be hypothetical, and in theory knows nothing of a non-enumerative or non-associative universal. A premise that has the utmost universality consistent with this view can clearly be of no service for the establishment of a proposition that has gone to the making of it. Nor again of one that has not. Its use, then, can only be as a memorandum. It is a shorthand formula of registration. Mill's view of ratiocinative process clearly stands and falls with the presumed impossibility of establishing the necessity for universals of another type than his, for what may be called principles of construction. His critics incline to press the point that association itself is only intelligible so far as it is seen to depend on universals of the kind that he denies.