Before passing on, however, I must point out, in the extract from p. 45, the characteristic habit which Mill has of _minimizing_ things which he is obliged to admit. Instead of denying straightforwardly that we have moral feelings, he says they are not present in all of us in any "perceptible degree." The moral faculty is capable of springing up spontaneously "in a certain small degree." This will remind every reader of the way in which, in his "Essays on Religion," instead of flatly adopting Atheism or Theism, which are clear logical negatives each of the other, he concludes that though God is almost proved not to exist, He may possibly exist, and we must "imagine" this chance to be as large as we can, though it belongs only "to one of the lower degrees of probability." Exactly the same manner of meeting a weighty question will be discovered again in his demonstration of the non-existence of necessary truths. I shall hope to examine carefully his treatment of this important part of philosophy on a future occasion. We shall then find, I believe, that his argument proves non-existence of such things as necessary truths, because those truths which cannot be explained on the association principle are very few indeed. I beg pardon for introducing an incongruous illustration, but Mill's manner of minimizing an all-important admission often irresistibly reminds me of the young woman who, being taxed with having borne a child, replied that it was only a very small one. Such are the intricacies and wide extent of ethical questions, that it is not practicable to pursue the analysis of Mill's doctrine in at all a full manner. We cannot detect the fallacious reasoning with the same precision as in matters of geometric and logical science. This analysis is the less needful too, because, since Mill's Essays appeared, Moral Philosophy has undergone a revolution. I do not so much allude to the reform effected by Mr. Sidgwick's "Methods of Ethics," though that is a great one, introducing as it does a precision of thought and nomenclature which was previously wanting. I allude, of course, to the establishment of the Spencerian Theory of Morals, which has made a new era in philosophy.[85] Mill has been singularly unfortunate from this point of view. He might be defined as the last great philosophic writer conspicuous for his ignorance of the principles of evolution. He brought to confusion the philosophy of his master, Bentham; he ignored that which was partly to replace, partly to complete it.