 At the time of his death, Hamilton's philosophical endeavors were widely regarded as offering the most profound treatment to date of some of philosophy's deepest and most perennial problems. This estimation did not persist for long. Two devastating attacks, from strikingly different philosophical perspectives, appeared in print within a decade. The best known of these was John Stuart Mill's Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1865). Mill's two volume work constituted a detailed and highly critical examination of Hamilton's philosophical contentions (as well as his excursions into logic) largely from the point of view of empiricism in general, and empirical psychology in particular. In the same year, the Scottish philosopher Hutchison Stirling, in Sir William Hamilton: Being the Philosophy of Perception an Analysis published the first (and ultimately only) part of an equally strenuous attack from an Idealist point of view. Hamilton's defenders leapt into print, notably the Oxford philosopher H L Mansel (whom Mill had also attacked) and John Veitch, Hamilton's student and amanuensis. James McCosh, then Professor of Logic at Belfast, also joined the fray with An Examination of Mr J S Mill's Philosophy (1866), though this was much more an attack on Mill than a defence of Hamilton.