question of sex showed, in the opinion of many, a constitutional incapacity to deal with the gravest problems of social economy. The standing of Mr. Mill as a mental philosopher appears to be very differently estimated by late critics and opponents and by himself, whether we consider the extent of his influence, or the relations of his doctrines to his nation and time; and there is a most singular inversion in these estimates of what we should naturally expect from friend and foe--an estimate of Mill's position and influence by his opponents, which, compared to his own, seems greatly exaggerated. For example, Dr. McCosh, a thorough-going opponent, regards Mill's influence as the most active and effective philosophical force now alive in Great Britain, the strongest current of philosophic thought even at Oxford; and M. Taine, who some years ago discovered at Oxford that the British nation was not wanting in "general ideas" or principles in its modes of thought above the requirements of the accountant and assayer, found these principles in a really living English philosophy, which has brought forth one of M. Taine's most elaborate critical studies in his work on "Intelligence." In contrast with these estimates, we have from Mr. Mill himself the opinion, in a letter to M. Taine, that his views are not especially English, and that they have not been so since the philosophical reaction in Scotland, Germany, and later in England, against Hume; that when his "System of Logic" was written he "stood almost alone in his opinions; and though they have met with a degree of sympathy which he by no means expected, we may still count in England twenty _a priori_ and spiritualist philosophers for every partisan of the doctrine of Experience." This estimate of his own influence and of the importance to metaphysical discussion at the present time of the philosophy he "adopted" is entitled to much more consideration than ought in general to be allowed for an opinion inspired by the ambition, the enthusiasm, the disappointments, or even the modesty of a philosophical thinker. Nevertheless, the far different opinion of his standing as a metaphysician which his critics entertain is undoubtedly more correct, though in a sense which was not so clearly apparent to him. They see clearly that a philosophy of which he was not the founder, and never pretended to be, has gained through his writings a hold, not only on English speculation, but on that of the civilized world, which it did not acquire even in England when it was an especially English philosophy, as it was "in the first half of the eighteenth century, from the time of Locke to that of the reaction against Hume."