Putting these statements in the order most convenient for discussion, I will deal first with the last of them. Instead of saying what he does, Dr. Mansel should have said that I decline to follow Sir W. Hamilton in confounding two distinct, and indeed radically-opposed, meanings of the word _belief_. This word “is habitually applied to dicta of consciousness for which no proof can be assigned: both those which are unprovable because they underlie all proof, and those which are unprovable because of the absence of evidence.”[24] In the pages of the _Fortnightly Review_ for July, 1865, I exhibited this distinction as follows:― “We commonly say we ‘believe’ a thing for which we can assign some preponderating evidence, or concerning which we have received some indefinable impression. We _believe_ that the next House of Commons will not abolish Church-rates; or we _believe_ that a person on whose face we look is good-natured. That is, when we can give confessedly-inadequate proofs, or no proofs at all, for the things we think, we call them ‘beliefs.’ And it is the peculiarity of these beliefs, as contrasted with cognitions, that their connexions with antecedent states of consciousness may be easily severed, instead of being difficult to sever. But unhappily, the word ‘belief’ is also applied to each of those temporarily or permanently indissoluble connexions in consciousness, for the acceptance of which the only warrant is that it cannot be got rid of. Saying that I feel a pain, or hear a sound, or see one line to be longer than another, is saying that there has occurred in me a certain change of state; and it is impossible for me to give a stronger evidence of this fact than that it is present to my mind. . . . . ‘Belief’ having, as above pointed out, become the name of an impression for which we can give only a confessedly-inadequate reason, or no reason at all; it happens that when pushed hard respecting the warrant for any ultimate dictum of consciousness, we say, in the absence of all assignable reason, that we _believe_ it. Thus the two opposite poles of knowledge go under the same name; and by the reverse connotations of this name, as used for the most coherent and least coherent relations of thought, profound misconceptions have been generated.”