It is always unfortunate to make a stumble on the threshold; and Mr. Mill's opening paragraph makes two. "The name of God," he says, "is veiled under two extremely abstract phrases, 'the Infinite and the Absolute.'... But it is one of the most unquestionable of all logical maxims, that the meaning of the abstract must be sought in the concrete, and not conversely."[AK]--Now, in the first place, "the Infinite" and "the Absolute," even in the sense in which they are both predicable of God, are no more names of God than "the creature" and "the finite" are names of man. They are the names of certain attributes, which further inquiry may, perhaps, show to belong to God and to no other being, but which do not in their signification express this, and do not constitute our primary idea of God, which is that of a Person. Men may believe in an absolute and infinite, without in any proper sense believing in God; and thousands upon thousands of pious men have prayed to a personal God, who have never heard of the absolute and the infinite, and who would not understand the expressions if they heard them. But, in the second place, "the absolute" and "the infinite," in Sir W. Hamilton's sense of the terms, cannot both be names of God, for the simple reason that they are contradictory of each other, and are proposed as alternatives which cannot both be accepted as predicates of the same subject. For Hamilton, whatever Mr. Mill may do, did not fall into the absurdity of maintaining that God in some of His attributes is absolute without being infinite, and in others is infinite without being absolute.[AL] [AK] _Examination_, p. 32. [AL] See _Examination_, p. 35. But we have not yet done with this single paragraph. After thus making two errors in his exposition of his opponent's doctrine, Mr. Mill immediately proceeds to a third, in his criticism of it. By following his "most unquestionable of all logical maxims," and substituting the name of God in the place of "the Infinite" and "the Absolute," he exactly reverses Sir W. Hamilton's argument, and makes his own attempted refutation of it a glaring _ignoratio elenchi_.