The fundamental antithesis of philosophy, mind and matter, or self and not-self, is similarly explained; the inter-association of phenomena, according to co-existence, succession, and likeness, results finally into their division into two great aggregates, and thus produces the duality of the self and the not-self. Yet Mill is not a pure nihilist like Hume; he makes a certain concession to realism. Behind the actual sensations, which are all we can tangibly grasp as they flash upon consciousness, he recognises a vast background of "permanent possibilities of sensation" out of which they seem to emerge. In the same way, he faintly recognises a substratum of our states of consciousness: mind is "a series of feelings, with a background of possibilities of feeling." This vague and unsatisfactory outline of mind and matter is, however, all we can discern beyond our actual states of consciousness. The anthropological problem remains insoluble, and the usual arguments for the existence of a First Cause are mere sophistry. He thinks the teleological argument, the discarded work of Paley, the only one with the faintest gleam of hope; and in his posthumous "Essays on Religion" he makes a painful effort to lend some support to Theism. His effort cannot do more than suggest the existence of a non-omnipotent God, whom no system would accept. Mill's system has had a very wide influence through out the century.
The number of writers who have subscribed to and popularized the empirical philosophy is very great and very illustrious. Lewes, in his "Problems of Life and Mind," and in his History, entirely accepts the empirical principles and their sceptical conclusions, which are common both to the English school and to Comtism, which he favoured. Professor Alexander Bain, the philosophical chief of Aberdeen University, of whom James Ward writes that, "with the exception of Locke, perhaps no English writer has made equally important contributions to the science of mind," has strenuously propagated the system in his classical works on psychology. Professor Clifford has advanced along the lines of Empiricism to a frank Materialism. Professor Tyndall, less a metaphysician than a most distinguished physicist, has been similarly conducted to Materialism. Professor Huxley has adhered more closely to the doctrine of Hume, rejecting not only
