Columbia XDlnfversftv 



(Tontrfbutions to Ebucation 



Ccacbere Collcae Series 





Glass. 
Book. 






Copyright^" 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 



THE EDUCATIONAL THEORY AND 
PRACTICE OF T. H. GREEN 



ABBY PORTER LELAND, PH.D. 



TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 
CONTRIBUTIONS TO EDUCATION, No. 46 



PUBLISHED BY 

aipartyfro (finllrgr, CEnlumbta Uniwrattg 

NEW YORK CITY 

1911 

I ^'-^ -v. ^V 



'■^<r<M-y«^lr^ 






Copyright, 1911, by Abby Porter Leland 



^d/!^ 



©CI.A3n3926 
'•'•0. { 



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PREFACE 

In the present age of specialization, an age in which the 
enthusiastic speciahst is in danger of seeing only his own par- 
ticular field and that perhaps out of relation to the whole 
experience, there is need of a philosophy of education to give 
principles that will "supply standpoints and methods which 
will enable an individual to make for himself an analysis of the 
elements" in the particular educational situation in which he 
finds himself. Such principles would tend to make a theory 
of education not less concrete and practical but more concrete 
and practical, because particular facts would be interpreted and 
seen in their relations thus becoming more real and more vital, 
a means for practical future functioning. It was in the belief 
that Green's thought furnishes a good example of a philosophy 
fraught with this type of educational possibilities that this brief 
study was undertai:en. 

The writer wishjps to express an appreciation of the courses 
she has taken witliithe professors of Columbia University, and 
more especially tholp courses of the professors of Teachers Col- 
lege, where, for t» past two years, she has done her major 
work. In ColumbilLhe worked chiefly with Professors Robin- 
son, Tawny, MontaSje, and Adler. Through Professor Mac- 
Vannel she became if%rested in attempting to apply the prin- 
ciples of philosophy in the field of education, and because of 
this interest she entered Teachers College in September 1909 for 
further study in the field of education. She owes much of 
whatever there may be of merit in this essay to her study in 
education with Professors Snedden, Strayer, Thomdike, Mon- 
roe, McMurry, Suzzallo, Dewey, and MacVannel, but more 
particularly is she indebted to Professor MacVannel with whom 
she has studied for four years, and under whose supervision this 
essay was undertaken and written. 

Abby Porter Leland 
May, 191 1 



\ 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER I 
INTRODUCTION 

PAGK 

Theory and Practice i 

CHAPTER II 

LIFE AND WRITINGS 

Boyhood and Youth 7 

Life in Oxford 8 

Formative Influences in his Career 9 

Writings 14 

CHAPTER III 

GREEN'S ETHICAL PHILOSOPHY 

The Self 18 

The Good 25 

CHAPTER IV 
SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 

The Individual and Society 31 

The Moral Ideal as Realized in Institutions 34 

Sociological Factors in the Development of the Individual 38 

CHAPTER V 

ASPECTS OF GREEN'S EDUCATIONAL THEORY AND 
PRACTICE 

Social and Educational Ideals 47 

Fundamental Educational Ideas 48 

Theory and Practice in Educational Affairs 53 

CHAPTER VI 

CONCLUSION 56 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 61 



THE EDUCATIONAL THEORY AND PRAC- 
TICE OP^ T. H. GREEN 

CHAPTER I 

INTRODUCTION 

A study of the life and writings of T. H. Green reveals a 
salutary inversion of the relation between theory and practice as 
this relation is often popularly conceived. One only too often 
hears such statements as, " Yes, that is a very good theory, but 
what would you do in practice?" " It is all very well for a 
teacher to know some theory, but it will not count for much when 
she begins to teach." Thus philosophy, far from being what 
Green conceived it to be, * the most practical thing about a man,' 
becomes, as Bradley declares, ' a ballet of bloodless categories.' 

Not only do Green's writings show that for him thinking is 
inseparable from action, but his own life is a witness to the 
union in one person of the well-balanced practical citizen and 
the broad-minded earnest thinker. The impression that he seems 
to have left upon most men, we are told, is that he was a 
practical, secular-minded man with a high regard for practical 
ability. " Yes," he would say in speaking of one who was being 
criticized for lack of scholarship, "but after all he is one of 
those men who knows what is the next thing to be done." ^ 

Not long after his election as tutor at Balliol College, Green, 
with the help of others, started the Temperance Public House 
and the Evening School at St. Clement's parish, Oxford. Al- 
though he did not actually found the University Settlement, 
nevertheless his work at this time certainly did foreshadow what 
is now popularly known as settlement work, and his philosophy 
is indeed a justification of that social work which is carried on 
to meet the concrete local needs, but with the breadth of point 
of view that makes the working out of a local problem an 

' Works, Vol. II, p. Ixiii. 



2 The Educational Theory and Practice of T. H. Green 

organic part of the larger social situation. " The first Univer- 
sity Settlement bore with justice the name of Arnold Toynbee,* 
but the ideas as Toynbee always acknowledged were those of 
Green." ^ Green's social and political ideas were an integral 
part of his entire philosophy, " springing from it," as Professor 
Muirhead says, " as an arch from supporting pillars." * Con- 
sidering the work and character of Green and that of his disciple 
Arnold Toynbee, it does not appear surprising that their aspira- 
tions should find recognition in the University Settlement idea. 

In the deepest sense Green's whole philosophical inquiry was 
one persistent attempt to discern the application of ideas to life. 
" The professed object of Hegel's philosophy," he once said, 
" was to discover formulae adequate to the action of reason as 
exhibited in nature and human life, in art and religion." This 
was the object of Green throughout his life as man and thinker 
— to discern the life of reason in nature and human experience, 
in the growth of knowledge and morality, in society, in religion, 
in human service. For Green theory arises out of practice with 
its ever expanding needs, and is the most potent factor in shap- 
ing or directing further practice. Theory is raised above prac- 
tice by reflection, and through the imagination it becomes in- 
carnated, as it were, in practice, but practice on an increasingly 
higher level. Ideas, therefore, were, in a sense, for him the 
very ' stufT and substance ' of experience. 

In his conception of the rational life. Green follows in the 
tradition of Aristotle : in the rational nature of man the impulse 
to know and to do have their common root. It is, however, 
for the most part, to the ethical and political situations that 
Green attempts to apply the principles he deduces from the 
impulse to know. " To find reason in human society, to show 

' For the actual founding of Toynbee Hall, East London, by the Rev. 
S. A. Barnett of St. Jude's Church and others, and for an account of 
the naming of the Hall the reader is referred to a recent article in the 
Harvard Theological Review, January, 191 1, by Gaylord S. White, entitled 
" The Social Settlement after Twenty-five Years." 

Reference may also be made in this connection to Talbert. The Dualism 
of Fact and Idea in its Social Implications (University of Chicago Press, 
Chicago, 1910). See pages 46-50 with accompanying references. "Most 
impressive, perhaps, of all instruments," says Dr. Talbert. " for under- 
standing and interpreting social movement is the modern social settle- 
ment." p. 46. 

'Muirhead, The Service of the State, p. 83. 

* Ibid., p. 86. 



Introduction 3 

that the hfe of citizenship was in essence a reasonable life, 
reasonable in its respect for institutions and accomplished facts, 
reasonable also in its sanguine hopes, aspirations and ideals — 
this was the central purpose and sober passion of his life." ^ 
For Green, indeed, throughout his life as philosopher and citi- 
zen, reason was at once " the most human and the most practical 
thing in man." ^ 

In one of his earliest essays, published in 1868, under the 
title, " Popular Philosophy in Relation to Life," Green attempts 
to indicate how theory originated in the practical demands of 
human nature. Man cannot resist his desire to understand him- 
self and his surroundings, and a theory in the making is the 
' most practical thing about a man ' because it becomes the 
potent factor in shaping his further activity. To build ideals 
is the very essence of a man's nature — ideals that are not only 
loftier than human nature as actualized but as real as human 
nature, for "philosophy does but interpret, with full conscious- 
ness and in system, the potvcrs already working in the spiritual 
life of mankind:'' ^ 

It is a matter of common agreement that there is a type of 
knowledge that seems separable from practice ; — as is the Crit- 
ique of Pure Reason, for example, when abruptly separated from 
the Critique of Practical Reason. There is, too, the philosopher 
who asserts his right to contemplate his own thoughts as his 
own private affair, and there is the ascetic who delights in his 
own mystic experiences, as far apart from the real world of 
action as it is possible for him to withdraw. Thus reflection 
may build up a theory which is not checked or utilized in 
further human activity. Yet history shows that since such re- 
flection does so on its own responsibility it usually suffers the 
penalty of being neglected or forgotten. In the process of its 
making it stands as an isolated aggregate of ideas unutilized or 
unchecked by that process of constructive imagination which 
transforms information into knowledge through insight into its 
applicability or possible functioning in concrete situations — so- 
cial, scientific, or artistic. Such projective or constructive ac- 
tivity of the imagination — operative in relation to possible con- 

* MacCunn, Six Radical Thinkers, p. 220. 

• Works, Vol. Ill, p. XXV. 
'Ibid., p. 93. 



4 The Educational Theory and Practice of T. H. Green 

Crete situations or needs — is the bond that unites theory and 
practice, ' keeps them combined,' making them the ' terminal 
aspects ' of one unitary process. 

Although Green did not work out in any such schematic 
formal way the relation between theory and practice, yet his 
thought in the entire body of his writings, as will be seen later, 
is not at variance with such an analysis. 

"A friend of Green's wrote in 1862: 'Almost all Green's 
definite opinions might be endorsed by Bright or Cobden, yet 
neither Bright nor Cobden could understand the process by 
which his opinions arc obtained, nor the arguments by which 
they are defended. An idealist in philosophy, he argues for the 
most utilitarian of political schools on idealistic principles.' " ^ 
Nettleship, Green's biographer, wrote that his Memoir of Green 
" seeks merely to record a fact which has never been common 
and which is especially rare in England, the fact of a life in 
which philosophy was reconciled with religion on the one side 
and with politics on the other ; the life of a man to whom reason 
was faith made articulate, and for whom both faith and reason 
found their highest expression in good citizenship." '■• 

It is of course true and immediately acknowledged that Green's 
aim was not at first educational in its reference; at least not 
educational in the so-called pedagogical sense ; and yet the entire 
impression that one gains from the study of his philosophy is 
that it is educational in its essence, — in its continued explanation 
of the bases of action, of the relation of knowledge to experi- 
ence, in its ceaseless search for possible application of ideas to 
life. Green's philosophy is fundamentally a theory of life and 
experience. Every such philosophy has within it the ' promise 
and potency ' of a philosophy of education. But Green's has 
something within it beyond mere promise and potency: while 
not an organized system of education, nevertheless it furnishes 
a reasonably complete treatment of an ethics, of a politics, of 
a philosophy of mind, together with a significant attempt to 
present a metaphysical foundation for these interrelated disci- 
plines. Above and beneath his theory, moreover, is an educa- 
tional motive, interest and endeavor which would appear to 



"Works, Vol. Ill, p. XX. 
^ Ibid., p. xi. 



Introduction 5 

justify an attempt to select certain of his dominating ideas and 
m brief and general outline to render their spirit in their edu- 
cational reference and import. 

There is a further consideration that may be noted here. 
"Rules," says Professor Dewey, "arc practical; they arc habit- 
ual ways of doing things. But principles are intellectual ; they 
are useful methods of judging things. The fundamental error 
of the intuitionist and of the utilitarian is that they arc on the 
lookout for rules which will of themselves tell agents just what 
course of action to pursue; whereas the object of moral prin- 
ciples is to supply standpoints and methods zvhich will enable 
the individual to make for himself an analysis of the elements 
of good and evil in the particular situation in zvhich he finds 
himself. No genuine moral principle prescribes a specific course 
of action ; rules like cooking recipes may tell just what to do 
and how to do it. A moral principle, such as that of chastity, 
of justice, of the golden rule, gives the agent a basis for looking 
at and examining a particular question that comes up. It holds 
before him certain possible aspects of the act; it warns him 
against taking a short or partial view of the act. It economizes 
his thinking by supplying him with the main heads by which to 
consider the bearings of his desires and purposes; it guides him 
in his thinking by suggesting to him the important considerations 
for which he should be on the lookout." ^° Just here lies, it is 
felt by the present writer, the peculiar value of a system of 
philosophy such as Green's for a theory of education. It does 
not supply a set of prescriptions for action, ' telling just what 
course of action to pursue.' It does appear to supply certain 
standpoints and methods which may enable an individual to 
make for himself a working analysis of * concrete situations,' 
and such situations are continually afforded by the teacher's 
work in educational theory and practice. It is in the belief 
that Green's thought furnishes a good example of a philosophy 
fraught with this type of educational possibilities that this brief 
study was undertaken. 

The aim, then, of the following chapters is first, to trace in 
outline Green's educational experience as it came to him in the 
course of his career as student and as teacher, and as it was 



Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, p. 333. 



6 The Educational Theory and Practice of T. H. Green 

precipitated in certain forms of educational endeavor ; second, 
by indicating the main principles of his philosophical and ethical 
inquiries to show some of their more important social and edu- 
cational implications. Though not in a sense strictly educa- 
tional principles, then, in their common acceptation, nor valu- 
able primarily from the point of view of their immediate 
applicabiHty to practice, they may furnish a body of criteria by 
which certain suggested form.s of activity in the present edu- 
cational situation may be studied and estimated. 



CPI AFTER II 
LIFE AND WRITINGS 

In considering the life of Green from the point of view par- 
ticularly of his social and educational theory and practice, it 
will perhaps be well to notice briefly the salient characteristics 
of the two periods into which it is obviously divided — namely, 
the period of his youth when he was, so to speak, in training 
for his work; and in the second place the period of his active 
life in Oxford as teacher, writer and citizen. Through such a 
study it may be possible to exhibit something — at least the actual 
conditions — of the ' process by which his opinions were ob- 
tained.' His life was, it would appear, singularly ' all of one 
piece.' Indeed, as Nettleship says in the opening paragraph 
of the Memoir: "A man who spends most of his life in think- 
ing, speaking and writing about philosophy and religion, and 
in quietly promoting the political and social interests of the 
town in which he lives is not likely to supply mateHal for a 
striking biography." ^ 

I 

Thomas Hill Green,- born in 1836 at Birkin, Yorkshire, of 
which his father, Valentine Green, was rector, was the youngest 
of four children — two sons and two daughters. As his mother 
died when Thomas was a year old, he, with the other children, 
was trained and educated by his father until, at the age of 
fourteen, he was enrolled at Rugby. Birkin was seven miles 
from a town, and the children seem to have had more fresh air 



'Works, Vol. Ill, p. xi. 

* It is of course necessary to state here that practically every detail 
enumerated in this section concerning Green's career as student and teacher 
is taken from the Memoir, written by R. L. Nettleship, to be found in the 
collected Works of Thomas Hill Green, Vol. Ill, pages xi-clix. The de- 
tails are noted or emphasized in accordance with the preconceived plan of 
this essay. In this connection it may be mentioned that Nettleship's 
Memoir has been published in a form separate from the Works with a 
brief Preface by Charlotte B. Green. 

7 



8 The Educational Theory and Practice of T. H. Green 

and freedom than training for social ease. Consequently, young 
Green, on his coming to Rugby, was not considered either bril- 
liant or precocious; he was rather a shy country boy, often 
awkward, and even deemed slow and indolent by some of his 
masters.^ There were, however, indications at a very early age 
of a maturity beyond his years and indications of moral judg- 
ment and reflection of a rather pronounced type. At the age 
of thirteen he wrote of another boy : " I dislike him very much 
still ; his rudeness, greediness, impudence and ingratitude are 
unparalleled." * He showed, moreover, literary skill and real 
power in work. In 1855, at the age of nineteen, he won the 
prize for Latin prose composition with his translation of Milton's 
Areopagitica. At about this time Green's love of independence 
in action is indicated by his comment upon the work required 
for the Queen's medal. He won the medal, he tells us, ' con- 
trary to his own expectation,' for the subject was one for which 
he had to consult ' a variety of fusty authorities,' which. Green 
goes on to relate : " I never can succeed in doing well ; I always 
find that if I cram myself with the ideas of others, my ozvn all 
vanish." ^ Green's sense of duty, we are told, was a prominent 
feature, perhaps the most prominent feature, in his character. 
" This sense of duty, combined with a strong sympathy with 
the weak and friendless, made him at school a staunch upholder 
of the monitorial system." ^ 

In 1855, at the age of nineteen. Green entered Balliol College, 
Oxford, with Benjamin Jowett as his college tutor. The clas- 
sics, still, had little attraction for him, and as a consequence he 
obtained only a second class in moderations. Feeling keenly 
this disgrace. Green exerted his powers and won in the summer 
of 1859 a first class in the school of literae humaniores; six 
months later he obtained a third class in the school of law and 
modern history. His study of the classics, as little as he cared 
for them, influenced not only his style but his thinking. This 
influence may be noted in any of his writings ; " The Philosophy 
of Aristotle," published in the North British Reviezv in 1866, 
is an evidence of the fact that Green seems never to have lost 



'Works, Vol. Ill, p. xiii. 
* Ibid., p. xii. 
' Ibid., p. xiii. 
'Ibid., p. xiv. 



Life and Writings 9 

his interest in law and history; in 1867 he lectured on the 
English Revolution, and during 1879 ^"^1 1880 on Principles of 
Political Obligation. 

As a student at Oxford, Green was grave, seriously thoughtful 
with the same pronounced moral judgment that was revealed 
in his childhood ; " yet relief to that gravity lay in his humour, 
which was not only abundant but genial and sympathetic." '' 
" The noblest feature in his character is a serious sympathy 
with the wrongs and sufferings of the poor." ^ Green was not 
a popular man, nor was he widely known ; he was, however, 
known and much appreciated and respected by a small group 
through his essays to the Old Mortality Club, and through his 
occasional speeches and papers before the Oxford Union. " Na- 
tional Life," " Political Idealism," " Influence of Civilization on 
Genius," " Christian Dogma," " The Force of Circumstances," 
were all written while Green was an undergraduate. The Min- 
utes of the Old Mortality Club, which make some reference to 
the former two essays and the three last-named essays published 
in the " Works," again serve at once to illustrate his " maturity 
of thought and expression and to show how early he had formed 
his characteristic views of political society." ^ Green himself 
attributed much of his success as an undergraduate to his older 
friends and tutors, Benjamin Jowett and John Conington. Net- 
tleship informs us that the writers from whom he seems at this 
time to have assimilated the most were Wordsworth, Carlyle, 
Maurice and probably Fichte in his lectures on the ' nature ' 
and ' vocation ' of the ' scholar ' and of ' man.' In them 
" he found the congenial idea of a divine life or spirit pervading 
the world, making nature intelligible, giving unity to history, 
embodying itself in states and churches, and inspiring individual 
men of genius." In such a man as Green, with his power and 
independence of mind, his broad social sympathies, and his deep, 
moral purpose, there was in the making the philosopher who 
was destined to take such an important part in shaping English 
thought in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Of the 



' Works, Vol. Ill, p. xix. 

* Ibid., p. xxi. Quoted by Nettleship as an extract from a journal (for 
1862) kept by a friend of Green. 

* Ibid., p. xxii. 



lo The Educational Theory and Practice of T. H. Green 

constructive work of this period in English thought Green might 
well be permitted to say in retrospect, quarum pars magna fui. 

In i860, at the age of twenty-four years, Green became a 
teacher at Oxford, lecturing upon ancient and modern history 
in Balliol during the absence of Mr. W. L. Newman. In the 
fall he was elected fellow of his College. In addition to his 
lectures at Balliol, he took a few private pupils. Green, how- 
ever, was not at all sure that he wished to devote himself to 
teaching. In 1863 he was offered the editorship of the Times 
of India. He wavered for a period between journalism, an 
educational appointment and college life. His academic interests 
prevailed, and he cast his lot with his own college, — Balliol. 
Upon the death of James Riddell in September 1866, Green 
was elected tutor. In 1870 Jowett became master of Balliol, 
and Green as tutor had the subordinate management of the 
College. Green, though much respected by his students for 
his power and earnestness of purpose, was never popular. From 
1868, however, he took during the summer vacation some of 
his students as companions, and from that time forward he 
appears to have grown on increasingly friendlier terms with 
them. 

Green lectured upon Aristotle and early Greek philosophy, as 
well as upon the English philosophers of the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries. At this time J. S. Mill was the dominant 
intellectual influence at Oxford. Green, through a sympathetic 
study of German philosophy, became the English exponent of 
the principles of Kant, Fichte and Hegel, principles which have 
been the most formative in the intellectual life of Oxford since 
the time of Green. 

In 1878 Green was elected to the Whyte professorship of 
moral philosophy. His lectures in ethics as Whyte professor, 
until the time of his death, form the substance of the " Pro- 
legomena to Ethics.'"' He died in 1882 at the age of forty-six. 

II 

In turning from Green's activity as a teacher, to his work 
as a writer, it will be recalled that he produced as an under- 
graduate, essays that showed unusual maturity, independence 
of thought and a philosophic interest. Even these undergradu- 



Life and Writings 1 1 

ate essays, from their originality and forcefulness, were a con- 
tribution to English philosophy. It may be well at this point 
to indicate briefly the trend of English thought about the time 
Green began to teach in Oxford. 

English philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 
attempted to solve the fundamental problems of experience in 
terms of sensationalism. Only the senses can be trusted; the 
understanding furnishes no surety in knowledge. Consequently, 
up to the nineteenth century, we do not find in England any 
very systematic attempt to bring the facts of knowledge and 
morality into connection with metaphysics or religion. There 
was little or no attempt to view human experience as a whole, — 
one does not encounter the type of reflection that sees a funda- 
mental unity in the human mind in its several capacities and 
activities. The type of philosophy, moreover, that did exist 
tended to a mechanical view of social relationships. Society 
was viewed as an aggregate of individuals bearing little more 
than incidental relations to one another, rather than as a natural 
and hence organic process ; and its interests were the sum of 
the interests of the members who composed it. In ethics this 
point of view came to be expressed in the hedonistic theory of 
Bentham with its utilitarian formulation — the ' greatest good 
of the greatest number.' 

On the continent Kant, Fichte and Hegel were showing that 
although sense is a factor in knowledge, it is not the only factor ; 
the mind contributes something. It is the mind's power of syn- 
thesis that is significant in the constitution of knowledge: this 
synthetic activity alone has the power of interpretation and 
unification of the manifold furnished by the senses. England 
had no great exponent of this type of thinking. Carlyle had 
felt the need of a greater sense of organic unity and believed 
that in work rather than in Bentham's greatest happiness cal- 
culus of pleasures such an organic unity would be found. His 
was the gospel of work — ' the greatest nobleness ' principle 
substituted for ' the greatest happiness ' principle. Coleridge, 
too, had been deeply influenced by German idealism and his 
fragmentary writings had a far-reaching effect upon the ten- 
dency of English thought. Green, however, was the first who 
seems to have found in German idealism principles which 



1 2 The Educational Theory and Practice of T. H. Green 

seemed to furnish the greater depth and breadth of point of 
view that Enghsh philosophy needed. 

In the earher half of the nineteenth century, the fundamental 
moral views of life had been derived from the poets rather than 
the philosophers. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, Brown- 
ing, Carlyle, Ruskin and others, had borne witness ' to the 
reality of spiritual forces ' ; whereas much of the thinking in 
philosophy, as was suggested above, was of a type with that 
which Hume's work had exhausted and had shown unsatisfac- 
tory. The work of Hamilton and Mansel indicates that the 
principles of Kant and Hegel had scarcely become an organic 
part of English thought. The impression left on one is that 
their work was but a borrowing added in a somewhat mechanical 
way to British empiricism. The result was a house built upon 
sand, lacking that sincerity and stability which, if the history of 
philosophy means anything, would seem to be a result only of 
an organic and not a merely mechanical type of thought and 
reflection. 

The name of John Stuart Mill is commonly associated merely 
with the movements of sensationalism, and utilitarianism, and 
the biological ideas of Darwin. In his treatment of the cri- 
terion of value, however, he maintains that quite apart from 
the quantitative distinctions among pleasures there are some 
pleasures altogether more desirable than others. In so far as he 
admits a qualitative difference he seems to fuse utilitarianism 
with idealism. As was noted in the preceding section, at the 
time Green became tutor at Oxford, Mill was perhaps the most 
potent influence in the intellectual life of the University. 
Through Jowett. who had first persuaded Green to study Hegel, 
the study of Greek philosophy at Oxford became less literary 
and scholastic and more a method of interpretation in human 
life and experience. About this time, also, Herbert Spencer 
was developing an ethical theory based upon conceptions derived 
from the natural sciences. Green found himself in almost con- 
tinual intellectual opposition to the work of Spencer and Lewes. 
In his account of their work which he regards as part at least 
of the result of that philosophical movement represented by the 
names of Locke, Berkeley and Hume, he speaks of them as 
' anachronistic' Of " the empirical psychology of our own 
country," Green declares that " the primaiy question of meta- 



Life and Writings 13 

physics still lies at its threshold and is finding nothing but a 
tautological or preposterous answer,"^" In his two criticisms 
on Herbert Spencer and Lewes, he emphasizes the fact that 
advance has been gained in that part of psychology which is 
really independent of metaphysics, that part which is the border 
line, as it were, between psychology and physiology. He goes 
on, however, to show that, under the guise of science and the 
scientific method, contemporary psycholog}' claims to have cleared 
itself of metaphysics — a thing which, Green insists, it cannot 
do ; furthermore, that the dominating metaphysics of contem- 
porary thought is pre-Kantian and even pre-Berkeleian ; that 
the modern ' experientialist ' does not complete but misunder- 
stands Hume's and Kant's doctrines. 

" Previous English sympathizers with German idealism," says 
Professor Tufts in his translation of Windelband," " had for 
the most part appropriated results." Green on the other hand 
resolutely attempted to carry on in English philosophy the Kan- 
tian tradition in criticism. Kant's question had been " What 
are the conditions of our intellectual and moral experience?" 
Green felt that, in the light of its new knowledge, the new ten- 
dencies of thought which were beginning to make themselves 
apparent, and an enriched experience, his generation demanded 
the reconsideration of the same questions as claimed the mind 
of Kant. He had learned much from English empiricism, but 
he felt throughout his career that the problem of his time should 
claim the * labor of the notion.' 

The outcome may be summed up in the words of Sturt, a 
recent and not an especially sympathetic critic of Green. " The 
teaching of Green and his successors," says the writer, " has 
enabled England to take its place in the general march of Euro- 
pean thought. Our home-bred philosophy with all its earnest- 
ness and good sense has been sadly lacking in depth and 
breadth of view : the shop-keeping narrowness, which a conti- 
nental statesman remarked in other sides of our national life, 
has left its mark upon our thinking. Before new influences 
came, too much was said of man as a creature of pains and 
pleasures, too little of him as a free creator of ideals ; too much 
of the human mind as a wax tablet, too little of it as supplying 

"Works, Vol. I. pp. 272,-2,7 A- 

" A History of Philosophj^ p. 669. 



1 4 The Educational Theory and Practice of T. H. Green 

the formative principles of knowledge; too much of God as a 
moderately benevolent taskmaster, too little of Him as a fount 
of righteousness and truth. There was but little of the philo- 
sophic spirit which views the world as from a mountain-top ; no 
professed philosopher taught in the spirit of Plato as the spec- 
tator of all time and existence." ^- 

It is now possible in the remainder of the chapter to enumerate 
the more important of Green's writings in their chronological 
order. In 1862 he won the Chancellor's prize for an essay 
entitled, " The Value and Influence of the Works of Fiction in 
Modern Times." This essay indicates both the author's breadth 
of interest and his real literary scholarship and appreciation. 
In 1866 he gave to the North British Review an article for pub- 
lication on the " Philosophy of Aristotle." During 1874 and 
1875 Green published his first criticism of English empiricism, 
in his introduction to a new edition of the works of Hume. He, 
at this time, speaks of his work as an inquiry' " into the course 
and philosophical movement which is represented by the names 
of Locke, Berkeley and Hume." Green's Introduction of three 
hundred and eighty pages to Hume's work of five hundred and 
fifty pages, presents destructive criticism of English rationalism 
and empiricism. The spirit in which the criticism is made is 
expressed on page 5 of the Introduction in these words : " A 
process, which looks like pulling a great philosopher to pieces, 
may be the true way of showing his greatness." This Intro- 
duction indicates Green's basic principles in philosophy, " the 
central conception " of which, Nettleship says, " is that the uni- 
verse is a single eternal activity or energy, of which it is the 
essence to be self-conscious, that is, to be itself and not itself 
in one. Of this activity, ' self-distinguishing and self-seeking,' 
every particular existence is a limited manifestation, and, among 
other such existences, those which we call ' ourselves.' " ^^ 

Three years after the publication of his Introduction to Hume, 
Green began to apply the same principles of criticism to the con- 
sideration of contemporary thought, as expressed by Herbert 
Spencer and G. H. Lewes, particularly their application of the 
doctrine of evolution to thought. Green, even though his prin- 
ciples had been set forth in his former work, gives his reason 

"Sturt, Idola Theatri, p. 152. 
^' Works, Vol. Ill, p. Ixxv. 



Life and Writings 15 

for believing in the need of such a criticism by stating his con- 
viction that " each generation requires the questions of philosophy 
to be put to it in its own language, and, unless they are so put, 
will not be at the pains to understand them." ^* 

With the exception of the " Prolegomena to Ethics " Green's 
works, edited by Professor R. L. Nettleship, formerly fellow and 
tutor of Balliol College, are collected in three volumes. Nettle- 
ship, fourteen years Green's junior, was for some time his student 
at Oxford; Green seems to have influenced profoundly his young 
friend. The first volume of the " Works of Thomas Hill 
Green " contains his Introduction to Hume ; and his criti- 
cism of Herbert Spencer: Parts I, H, HI and V were published 
in the Contemporary Reviczv, 1877-1881. The second volume 
contains previously unpublished philosophical papers selected 
from his manuscript lectures, on the philosophy of Kant ; his 
lectures on logic; on freedom; his lectures on the principles of 
political obligation. Volume HI contains the excellent Memoir 
written by the editor; articles and reviews upon philosophy 
reprinted from periodicals ; two lay sermons or addresses ; sev- 
eral lectures; and several previously unpublished essays. The 
two addresses on the " Witness of God " and " Faith," deliv- 
ered in 1870 and 1877, were at first printed privately; and later 
they were published with an unfinished preface by Arnold Toyn- 
bee, who died in 1883 — just a year after the death of his master. 
The lecture delivered at Oxford to the Wesleyan Literary 
Society, on " The Work to be Done by the New Oxford High 
School for Boys," Avas published in 1882. The lecture on " The 
Grading of Secondary Schools " was delivered to the Birming- 
ham Teachers' Association and published in the Journal of 
Education, May, 1877. The two lectures on " The Elementary 
School System of England " were delivered at Oxford in the 
Central School in February, 1878. 

As was suggested in the previous chapter. Green was not only 
a teacher and a writer, but his life is a witness to the union 
in one man of the theoretical interest and its application in prac- 
tical affairs. In December 1864, he was made assistant-com- 
missioner by the Royal Commission upon middle-class schools. 
He was engaged in this work much of the time during 1865, and 
1866, and he took a deep interest in it. In 1868 Green wrote a 

"Works, Vol. I, p. 373. 



1 6 The Educational Theory and Practice of T. H. Green 

report, later published by the Commission, in which he sug- 
gested a better organization of the schools. He was also elected 
as the teachers' representative on the governing body of King 
Edward's schools in Birmingham, taking an active part in the 
work. Concerning the latter, he made a report in 1868. In 
these various ways his philosophical thinking, it may be said, 
found some definite expression in the educational situation of 
his time. In 1871 Green married Charlotte Symonds, sister of 
his friend, John Addington Symonds, and daughter of Dr. 
Symonds of Clifton. They had no children. 

As Green had taken an active part in the educational interests 
of England, so he was active in its politics. In 1867 he had 
spoken on a political question for the first time in behalf of the 
Reform Bill. The year following he made a speech in Oxford 
concerning the recently extended franchise. In 1870 he spoke 
in favor of Forster's Education Bill, and in 1874 he was elected 
a member of the Oxford school board. 

His very practical interest in the social question is indicated 
by his setting up in St. Clement's parish, Oxford, a coffee tavern. 
His continued interest in social and educational affairs is re- 
vealed by the fact that he contributed in 1877 two hundred 
pounds for the building of the Oxford High School, and by 
the fact tiiat he founded a scholarship of twelve pounds a year 
for boys from the elementary schools. His will is another evi- 
dence of this interest: according to its conditions, after the 
death of his wife, there were to be given one thousand pounds 
to the University for a prize essay in moral philosophy ; one 
thousand pounds for a scholarship at the Oxford High School; 
and three thousand five hundred pounds to Balliol College for 
promoting education in large towns. 

" Professor Green's great influence on the life of the Uni- 
versity and the city of Oxford." wrote Edward Caird, his friend 
of many years, " to which so many testimonies have been given 
since his death, was not due to any of the usual sources of popu- 
larity. Wanting in superficial readiness of sympathy, wanting 
also in the sanguine flow of animal spirits, and by constitutional 
reserve often prevented from expressing what he felt and wished 
to express, he yet gradually created in those around him a 
sense of security in trusting him which was due to the trans- 
parent purity of his aims, and to the entire absence of personal 



Life and Writings 17 

assumption and petty ambition. It was due, it may be added, 
to the secret fire of ethical enthusiasm, which gradually made 
itself felt through the unpretending simplicity and business-like 
directness of his manner. His very reticence and unwillingness 
to speak, except upon knowledge and from necessity, gave an 
additional, and sometimes an almost overpowering, weight to 
his words when he did speak. And in later years the conscious- 
ness of the success of his work, both speculative and practical, 
(however he might underestimate it), and also the consciousness 
of the sympathy, which he found in his home and in a widening 
circle of friends who understood him, seemed to soften the 
strength of his character and give him greater freedom in the 
use of his powers. There are not a few among the Oxford men 
of the last fifteen years to whom, as was once said of another 
teacher, 'his existence was one of the things that gave reality 
to the distinction between good and evil.' " ^^ 



" Preface, pp. 6-7. Essays in Philosophical Criticism edited by Andrew 
Seth and R. B. Holdane, and dedicated to the memory of Thomas Hill 



Green 



CHAPTER III 

GREEN'S ETHICAL PHILOSOPHY 

The present essay is concerned primarily with Green's ideas 
in their relation to social and educational tendencies in thought 
and practice. Much is omitted that might well have been in- 
cluded in any detailed statement; much indeed, perhaps, is 
omitted arbitrarily. Many criticisms have been made upon the 
work of Green conceived as a system, the justice of some of 
which is freely conceded. The criticisms of Professor Dewey,^ 
of Seth,^ of Sidgwick,^ and Taylor* seem to the writer a part 
of an invaluable reconstructive criticism of certain of Green's 
philosophical ideas.^ It would appear, indeed, the part of good 
fortune that any writer should seem worthy of such criticism. 
The unity of Green's work is a unity rather of tendency and 
endeavor. This essay accordingly, while presupposing the valid- 
ity of the criticism of the writers mentioned, attempts to indicate 
certain elements of content, method, and emphasis in the work 
of Green of permanent significance in social and educational 
theory. 

In attempting to select from the wealth of material which 
Green has left, it seems best in the light of the writer's precon- 
ceived purpose (i) to restate briefly the problem which Green 
felt to be peculiarly his own, and the method he considered best 
fitted for its solution, (2) to summarize the essential elements 
in his teaching concerning certain of his fundamental ethical 
notions : keeping in mind, of course, the fact that such ethical 
conceptions were necessarily fundamental also to his social and 
political theories, and undoubtedly, likewise, would have been 
fundamental to a theory of education conceived and written in 
the same spirit. 

* Philosophical Reviezv, Vol. II, pp. 652-664. 
*Hegelianism and Personality. 

•The Ethics of T. H. Green, Herbert Spencer, and J. Martineau, pp. 1-131. 

* The Problem of Conduct, pp. 50-88. 

* See note at end of chapter. 
18 



Green's Ethical Philosophy 19 

The late Master of Balliol, Edward Caird, in the Preface to 
the " Essays in Philosophical Criticism " — dedicated to the 
memory of Green — says that the latter's " entire work was 
devoted to the development of the results of the Kantian criti- 
cism of knowledge and morals." Kant's question was essen- 
tially this : " How is our intellectual and moral experience pos- 
sible ?" Green's question "^ is also concerned with the nature of 
the factors in, the conditions of the possibility of, experience. 
What are the presuppositions of experience? What makes it 
an existence 'all of one piece'? What is the nature of the 
factors that enter into an intellectual and moral situation? Be- 
fore Green enquires what man ought to be he attempts to answer 
the previous question concerning the actual nature of man. 
What is an individual? What does he do? What is his place 
in Nature? His task in the Prolegomena is essentially a 
critique of the presuppositions of experience — and thus of edu- 
cation — self and environment. 

" What is the province of moral philosophy? ' It deals with 
man as a moral agent,' but what is moral agency? Is there 
anything about it to distinguish moral philosophy from natural 
science? There is an anthropology which is simply a branch of 
natural science. It regards man, like any other animal, as a 
mere result of natural influences ; inquires how by a long course 
of adaptation to environment the human animal has been so 
modified as to be what he is ; what are the chief varieties of 
this animal, and how they are to be accounted for. There is 
no doubt that anthropology so understood is a valid science. 
Is moral philosophy merely a branch of it? an inquiry into 
certain secondary modes of pleasure and pain, arising from 
adaptation to a social environment, which determine the actions 
specifically called moral, and into the bearing of such actions 
upon the further natural production of pleasure? If so, it is 
a purely natural science, moral agency being merely a most 
complicated form of natural agency, complicated by the develop- 

* Works. Vol. II, p. 84. " The view here stated, of the distinction 
between the natural sciences (or sciences properly so-called) on the one 
side, and the inquiry into the functions of reason as (i) theoretic, and 
(2) practical, is founded on that of Kant. Nor is it possible to discuss 
the present state of the question in regard to the possibility of moral 
philosophy, as distinct from a natural science of anthropology, without 
taking Kant's Critique as the point of departure, whether one altogether 
adopts his conclusions or no." 



20 The Educational Theory and Practice of T. H. Green 

ment of the social ' medium ' or ' organism,' and its reaction 
upon the individual." "' 

In this form Green attempts to direct attention to the ques- 
tion, What distinction, if any, is there between natural and 
moral agency? Evidence of the fact that man was thought to 
be more than that to which the work of Hume, of Lewes, and 
of Spencer had tended to reduce him was of course recognized 
by Green to be prevalent in the thought — if not in the strictly 
philosophical thinking — of his day, as he assures us in his intro- 
duction to the " Prolegomena to Ethics." ® He begins this work 
by saying that apology for his subject is a poor way to win 
general confidence. Is there such a thing as Moral Philosophy 
or not — such, practically, is his question. Yet such a mode 
of procedure is prescribed for him, not only by the ' logical 
impulse to begin at the beginning, but by observation of preva- 
lent opinions around him.' There was of course no lack of 
utterance in regard to the great problems of life or the rights 
and wrongs of human conduct. Poetic guesses as to some 

' sweet strange mystery. 
Of what beyond these things may lie, 
And yet remain unseen ' 

met with ready acceptance. Nevertheless such a dualism between 
reason and faith, science and poetry, between philosophy and 
science, as Green believed to exist, could not yield a permanent 
satisfaction or security. Only a reconstruction of ethical theory 
could in the long run satisfy the inquiring mind. What does 
it mean, what does it imply — "to have a conscience, to feel 
remorse, to pursue ideals, to be capable of education through 
appeals to the sense of honor and of shame, to be conscious 
of antagonism between the common and private good, and even 
sometimes to prefer the former." " This is Green's problem, 
and it constitutes the problem of his Ethical and Political Phil- 
osophy, of which the latter " is only the application to facts of 
social life, under definite circumstances, of the truth arrived at 
by the former." " Briefly, then. Green's answer to the question 

' Works, Vol. II, p. 83. 

* Prolegomena to Ethics, Sec. 7. 

" Fairbrother, The Philosophy of T. H. Green, p. 9. 



Green's Ethical Philosophy 2 1 

of the distinction between ' natural ' and * moral ' agency is 
that, for him, if moral philosophy is merely a branch of anthro- 
pology (in the sense noted in the preceding paragraph), an at- 
tempt to work out a moral and political philosophy is not only 
valueless : it is meaningless : for it is obvious that to a being 
who is simply a result of natural forces an injunction to obey 
their laws is unmeaning. It implies that there is something in 
him independent of those forces, which may determine the re- 
lation in which he may stand to them}^ Here, then, is Green's 
conception of the distinction between natural and moral agency. 
" The formula for such distinction," he says, " is best given by 
Kant : ' Everything in nature works according to laws ; the dis- 
tinction of a rational being is the faculty of acting according to 
the consciousness of laws, i.e., according to principles ' : and 
if," Green continues, " man is an agent of the latter sort, there 
will be a place for inquiry, quite distinct from natural science, 
into the forms of 'inner life' arising out of this consciousness, 
an ' inner life ' to zvhich the index mill be the language and 
institutions of men." ^- 

That ' something ' in man independent of the forces of nature, 
but which may determine the relation in which he may stand 
to them, is self-consciousness which is for Green " the central, 
fundamental and determining conception "^-^ of ethical theory. 
The first condition of experience — intellectual or moral — is thus 
the self. The human individual is a self and his special char- 
acteristic is self-consciousness. 

In the conscious organism alone does the distinction between 
itself and its relations to its ' environment ' appear. 

" The living body does not, as such, present its nature to 
itself in consciousness. It does not consciously distinguish itself 
from its relations. Man, on the other hand, does so distinguish 
himself, and in so doing is his special distinction." ^* 

" Each of us is one or individual, not merely in the sense 
that he feels and is so far conscious, but in the sense that he 
represents his feelings to himself, that he distinguishes himself 
from them, and is conscious of them as manifold relations in 



" Prolegomena to Ethics, Sec. 7. 

" Works, Vol. II, pp. 83-84. 

" Windeiband, A History- of Philosophy, p. 669. 

" Prolegomena to Etliics, Sec. 80. 



2 2 The Educational Theory and Practice of T. H. Green 

which he, the single self, stands to the world, — in short, as 
manifold facts. It is thus only as self-conscious that we are 
capable of knowledge, because only as self-conscious that we are 
aware of being in the presence of facts." ^^ 

Again Green says, " The real unity underlying the operations 
of intelligence is also man's self-conscious self." ^^ 

Man's self-conscious self is also the real unity underlying the 
operations of desire and will. The world of practice is not 
given to man: he makes his world for himself. Will is desire 
in action, and because man identifies himself with some object 
in which he believes, and conceives himself as fulfilling his 
desire, and so acts, determined by circumstances and his own 
character, is he free. 

" The Ego identifies itself with some desire, and sets itself 
to bring into real existence the ideal object, of which the con- 
sciousness is involved in desire. This constitutes an act of will ; 
which is thus free, not in the sense of being undetermined by 
a motive, but in the sense that motive lies in the man himself, 
that he makes it and is aware of doing so, and hence, however 
he may excuse himself, imputes to himself the act which is 
nothing else than the expression of the motive." " 

Thus by reflection does man feel himself as free, does he feel 
that motive is within him, that thus human action is due to self- 
determination. It is self-consciousness, indeed, that makes man 
free. 

" There is," Green continues, " nothing in the fact that what 
a man now is and does is the result (to speak pleonastically, 
the necessary result) of what he has been and has done, to pre- 
vent him from seeking to become, or from being able to become, 
in the future other and better than he now is, unless the capacity 
for conceiving a better state of himself has been lacking in him 
in the past or has become lost to him at the present." ^^ 

For Green, then, ' the self is a conscious subject distinguishing 
itself from the objects it knows and the ends it chooses.' It 
is the active agent in, the bearer of, an intellectual and moral 
experience. As the fleeting sensations of experience are inter- 

" Prolegomena to Ethics, Sec. 120. 
^*Ibid., Sec. 129. 
" Ibid., Sec. 102. 
"/Wrf., Sec. no. 



Green's Ethical Philosophy 23 

preted and organized by the self into a world of related objects, 
so its appetites and impulses are translated and organized into 
a ' world of wanted objects.' For each conscious subject 
there is a " world of feeling, however limited in its actual range, 
yet boundless in capacity, of which he represents himself as the 
center," As the essential factor in that phase of experience 
designated intellectual there is the self's activity in thinking and 
knowing, so as the essential factor in that aspect of experience 
designated moral there is present as its constitutive element the 
self's activity in desiring and willing. Intelligence and will, how- 
ever, are not to be regarded as separate or disparate activities — 
rather they are to be regarded as " two equally primitive and 
co-ordinate possibilities " of the self, having " a common source 
in one and the same self-consciousness." 

" On the whole matter, then, our conclusion," writes Green,^* 
" must be that there is a single object or agent which desires in 
all the desires of a man, and thinks in all his thoughts, but that 
the action of this subject as thinking — thinking speculatively or 
understanding, as well as thinking practically — is involved in 
all its desires, and that its action as desiring is involved in all 
its thoughts. Thus thought and desire are not to be regarded 
as separate powers, of which one can be exercised by us with- 
out, or in conflict with, the other. They are rather different 
ways in which the consciousness of the self, which is also neces- 
sarily consciousness of a manifold world other than self, ex- 
presses itself. One is the effort of such consciousness to take 
the world into itself, the other its effort to carry itself out into 
the world; and each effort is involved in every complete spiritual 
act." 

One or two passages may be introduced in this connection 
in further illustration or explication of Green's working con- 
ception of the self. It is freely admitted, as was stated above, 
that in many places Green in his terminology comes dangerously 
near to the traditional terminology of intellectualism and even to 
the disasterous consequence inevitably following the attempt to 
put new wine in old bottles: yet the impression left on one is, 
as was also maintained above, that of a unity of tendency and 
endeavor. Green sought for philosophical ideas " adequate to 

" Prolegomena to Ethics, Sec. 136. 



24 The Educational Theory and Practice of T. H. Green 

the actions of reason as exhibited in nature and human society, 
in art and rehgion " : and the test of philosophical ideas was 
fundamentally, perhaps, for Green, as Professor Muirhead con- 
tends, " their working power as a basis for human effort.'"-" 
When in his ethical and political philosophy Green submits to 
the influence of the intellectualistic tradition, he is better than 
his theory: he is pragmatist and humanist. The logic of the 
intellect gives way to the subtler logic of life. 

In attempting further, then, to characterize Green's idea of 
the self — its unity, its organic character, its continuity, its self- 
active nature — the following may be noted as typical passages 
of the " Prolegomena to Ethics " : 

"The unity of an individual soul is implied in all feeling; 
or perhaps we should rather say that feeling constitutes the 
unity of the individual soul." -^ 

" It is thus equally important to bear in mind that there is 
a real unity in all a man's desires, a common ground of them 
all, and that this real unity or common ground is simply the 
man's self, as conscious of itself and consciously seeking in the 
satisfaction of desires the satisfaction of itself." - 

" It is clea.r that between the action of the self-conscious soul 
in desiring, and its action in learning to know there is real 
unity." -^ 

For Green the very' meaning of a ' fact of consciousness ' 
involved an interaction, ' a multiplicity in unity.' He agreed 
with Kant that the possibility of experience is a permanent self. 
Otherwise experience could not exist for me; it could not be 
my experience. So Kant, " Permanence, therefore, is a necessary 
condition under which alone phenomena as things or objects, 
can be determined in a possible experience." -* 

Green's conception of personal identity was in direct opposi- 
tion to that of Hume. " When I enter most intimately into what 
I call myself," wrote Plume, " I always stumble on some par- 
ticular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love 
or hatred, pleasure or pain " ;-" the self " is nothing but a bundle 

"" The Service of the State, p. 8. 
"'Prolegomena to Ethics, Sec. 119. 
"Ibid., Sec. 129. 
"^ Ibid., Sec. 133. 

-* Critique of Pure Reason (Trans, by Max Miiller), p. 154. 
'^Hume. Treatise on Human Nature, Book I, Part I, Sec. VI (Green 
and Grose Edition). 



Green's Ethical Philosophy 25 

or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other 
with inconceivable rapidity, and arc in perpetual flux and move- 
ment." 

For Green, on the other hand, the self by reflection knows 
itself as permanent, as opposed to the manifold changes of its 
states. Immediate experience occurs in a consciousness that is 
continuous. In the self is found, we can understand Green as 
saying, a process returning upon itself in a way as to retain 
its existing quality or individuality. While changing it is never- 
theless permanent, remaining one, as it does, in its life-process — 
one in and through the unity and continuity of its activity — 
its character. 

It is this aspect of the self as continuous that insures for 
Green responsibility in conduct. " If I could ' trammel up the 
consequence' of that which at any time I am and do; if there 
could be any break of continuity between what I shall be and 
what I am; then indeed I might be reckless of what I do, so 
long as it is pleasant, and, in what I allow myself to be, might 
take no thought of what it is desirable that I should become." ^^ 

In turning from the consideration of Green's idea of the self, 
its characteristic and the more important forms of activity, to 
what may be designated the record of his fundamental ethical 
notions of the idea of the good, it will be recalled that for Green 
ethical or moral action means properly human action, the action 
of a self-conscious subject or self. In the moral acts of such 
a self, the motive is something different from mere animal want. 
Self-consciousness again supervenes upon a manifold. In moral 
action some form of satisfaction (not merely as the Hedonist 
would assert) is aimed at. The motive may be the conscious- 
ness of zvanted objects, or the idea of a satisfaction on the whole. 
Such a description of course will apply to both good and bad 
actions, a moral action meaning, as it does for Green, the 
action of a being capable of virtue and therefore, also, of vice. 
According to Green, therefore, the characteristic of moral action 
is that the satisfaction of the self is sought where it cannot 
permanently be found. 

The Good, then, is defined by Green as that which satisfies 
some desire, and the True Good as an abiding satisfaction of an 



Prolegomena to Ethics, Sec. 112. 



26 The Educational Theory and Practice of T. H. Green 

abiding self. It is not the momentary pleasure of the sentient 
human being nor the summation of pleasures long drawn out, 
but ' the abiding satisfaction of an abiding self.' The good, 
the moral ideal is the realization of the capabilities of the self: 
it is the realization of the faculties of a self-conscious subject. 
What then is the faculty? What the direction in which the 
good, the moral ideal may be further developed? 

" We cannot indeed," says Green, " describe any state in which 
man, having become all that he is capable of becoming — all 
that, according to the divine plan of the world, he is destined 
to become — would find rest for his soul. We cannot conceive 
it under any forms borrowed from our actual experience, for 
our only experience of activity is of such as implies incom- 
pleteness. . . . Yet the conviction that there must be such 
a state of being, merely negative as is our theoretical apprehen- 
sion of it, may have supreme influence over conduct, in moving 
us to that effort after the Better which, at least as a conscious 
effort, implies conviction of there being a Best." -^ 

What criteria, then, does Green suggest as enabling us to 
distinguish the pursuit of the true good from the pursuit of 
illusion, since in every individual there may be said to be in 
some sense a realization of capabilities? The realization of capa- 
bilities lies in the discharge of function. The * form ' of the 
virtuous life is constant : its ' content ' changes from age to 
age. The ' form ' of the good life, throughout the generations 
of men, for Green may be described as characterized " by the 
consciousness of there being some perfection which has to be 
attained, some vocation which has to be fulfilled, some law which 
has to be obeyed, something absolutely desirable whatever the 
individual may for the time desire; that it is in ministry to 
such an end that the agent seeks to satisfy himself." 

"And when we come," continues Green,^* " to ask ourselves 
what are the essential forms in which however otherwise modi- 
fied, the will for true good (which is the will to be good) must 
appear, our answer follows the outlines of the Greek classifi- 
cation of the virtues. It is the tvill to know what is true, to make 
what is beautiful ; to endure pain and fear, to resist the allure- 
ments of pleasure (i.e., to be brave and temperate), if not, as 

" Prolegomena to Ethics, Sec. 172. 
^ Ibid., Sec. 256. 



Green's Ethical PJiilosopky 27 

the Greek would have said, in the service of the state, yet in 
the interest of some form of human society ; to take for oneself, 
to give to others, of those things which admit of being given 
and taken, not what one is inclined to but what is due." 

Thus far in the present chapter the general characteristics of 
the two central notions of Green's ethical theory — the self, and 
the good — have been noted. In the case of both notions con- 
sideration has been given especially to their significance in rela- 
tion to human practice and endeavor. In concluding the section 
a brief summary of the characteristics emphasized by Green may 
be noted in preparation for the next chapter. Using biological 
terminology it may be said that the present section has aimed 
to indicate Green's treatment of the ' moral agent ' ; the section 
following the present will attempt to give in outline Green's 
account of ' the situation ' — the objective conditions, in other 
words, which give form and content to the moral ideal, and which 
render the actualization of the moral ideal possible. 

It may then be possible to summarize Green's characterization 
of the good as follows: 

(i) The common characteristic of the good is that it satisfies 
some desire.'*' The true good is " an abiding satisfaction of 
an abiding self." '"' This abiding satisfaction can be attained by 
complete self-realization or perfection, the reali::ation of the 
capacities of the human soul. The moral ideal, therefore, is to 
be found in thelpyovof man. The idea of self-realization brings 
out two phases of the moral ideal : 

(a) The moral ideal does not subordinate the self to any 
law outside itself. The self wins for itself the moral ideal 
by a constant process of development — the self ever reaching 
for a better and thereby conceiving a ' best ' and a ' better ' than 
a ' best.' 

(b) The moral ideal is to be found " in the active, volitional 
phase of the self. The self in making the conceived best its 
own ideal, thinks, feels, and wills, but more particularly wills." 

(2) The idea in man ' of something he knows not what, which 
he mav and should become' has been the socializing or moral- 
izing force in human life, according to Green, yielding our moral 
standards or ideals and obtaining obedience to them. The ideal 



^ Prolrgomcr.a to Ethics, Sec. 171. 
"Ibid., Sec. 234. 



2 8 1 lie Educational TJieory and Practice of T. H. Green 

is not pleasure, is not the greatest happiness, but a fortn of 
human life. The moral ideal, therefore, is a principle for it 
supplies " standpoints and methods which zvill enable the indi- 
vidual to make for himself an analysis of the elements of good 
and evil in the particular situation in which he finds himself.'' "^ 

(3) The good for Green seems to be both competitive and 
non-competitive. Its non-competition seems to resemble the 
Kantian " good zvill," the inwardness of ethical thought, whereas 
the competition aspect includes the manifold development of 
human capacities — aptrri. " Each man pressing beyond himself 
that he may ' contribute to and participate in the good of a 
body of his fellows' necessarily renders the good competitive." 
Sidgwick does not believe that these two aspects of the good 
may be combined.^- Green finds their harmonization in the self- 
devotion to an ideal of mutual service — " in the settled disposi- 
tion on each man's part to make the most and best of humanity 
in his own person and in the persons of others." ^^ 

(4) The moral ideal is not a transcendental conception ; it is 
human in that it has its bases in experience, in the develop- 
ment of human capacities, in man's conception of a ' better ' 
than his ' best.' The moral ideal is therefore not merely 
abstract, nor does it involve a monotonous life of uniformity ; 
it is concrete and requires the most varied contributions, scien- 
tific, social, and artistic. The moral ideal is merely a name 
for the interpretation or idealization of the common problem of 
the human task. 

(5) The moral ideal is not only personal, for Green, but it is 
also social. The social and personal are merely terminal aspects, 
as it were, of the one problem. The moral ideal " is at its 
lowest a demand for some well-being which shall be common to 
the individual deserving it with others ; and only as such does 
it yield those institutions of the family, the tribe, and the state, 
which further determine the morality of the individual." ^* " The 
human spirit can only realize itself, or fulfil its idea, in persons, 
and it can only do so through society, since society is the con- 



"Dcwev and Tufts, Ethics, p. 333- 

*^ Sidgwick. The Ethics of T. H. Green, Herbert Spencer and J. Mar- 
tineau. 

^^ Prolegomena to Ethics, Sec. 244. 
"^Ibid., Sec. 286. 



Green's Ethical Philosophy 29 

ditioii of the development of a personality." ^^ Man cannot 
contemplate himself in a better state, or on the way to the best, 
without contemplating others, not merely as a means to that 
better state, but as sharing it with him." ■"'^ " The principle 
which is here sought to maintain is that the perfection of human 
character — a perfection of individuals which is also that of 
society, and of society which is also that of individuals — is for 
man the only object of absolute or intrinsic value." ^^ " The good 
has come to be conceived with increasing clearness, not as any- 
thing which one man or set of men can gain or enjoy to the 
exclusion of others, but as a spiritual activity in which all par- 
take, and in which all must partake, if it is to amount to a full 
realization of the faculties of the human soul." ^"^ 

What then is the nature of the situation, the objective set 
of conditions in which the moral ideal, the ideal of the per- 
fection of human capacity is becoming increasingly actualized, 
i.e., realized? To give Green's answer to this question in its 
main outlines is the task of the following chapter. 

Note — In illustration of the type of reconstructive criticism referred to 
on page 18, quotation may be made from that of Professor Dewey in the 
Philosophical Review. In criticizing Green's theory of moral motive, 
Professor Dewey says,'° " Green himself is better than his theory, and 
engages us in much fruitful analysis of specific moral experience, but, as 
I shall attempt to show, his theory (of the moral motive), taken in logical 
strictness, admits of no reduction into terms of individual deeds." 

Professor Dewey maintains that Green's self is a " presupposed fixed 
scheme or outline, while realization consists in the filling up of this 
schema." ■" The difficulty, however, bound up with the question why a 
completely realized self should think it worth while to duplicate itself in 
an unrealized, or relatively empty, self, how it could possibly do this even 
if it were thought worth while, and why, after the complete self had 
produced the incomplete self, it should do so under conditions rendering 
impossible (seemingly eternally so) any approach of the incomplete self 
to its own completeness — this difficulty, I say, should make us wary of the 
conception, provided we can find any working theory concerning unrealized 
powers (capacities) which would avoid the difficulty."''^ In the "concep- 
tion of the presupposed self, that self is already there as a fixed fact, even 
though it be as an eternal self. The only reason for performing any moral 
act is then for this self. Whatever is done is done for this fixed self. 
I do not believe it possible to state this theory in a way which does not 

" Prolegomena to Ethics, Sec. 191. 

"""Ibid., Sec. igg. 

" Ibid., Sec. 247. 

" Ibid., Sec. 286. 

^ Green's Theorv of Moral Motive, in Philosophical Reinezc, Vol. I, 
P- 597- 

*" Self-Realization as the Moral Ideal, in Philosophical Review, Vol. II, 
p. 653. 

** Ibid., p. 654. 



30 The Educational Theory and Practice of T. H. Green 

make action selfish in the bad sense of selfish."" "The method with 
which Green meets the difficuky (though he never, as far as I recall 
spcaMly recogmzcs it), is to split the presupposed self into two parts' 
one the self so far as realized up to date, the other the ideal and as vet 
unrealized self. Ihe realized self then becomes the agent, the ideal self 
the goal of action. The realized self acts for the ideal itself. In so acting 
Its motive IS the ideal self, perfection, goodness "" 

In connection with this criticism by Professor Dewey of the lo"ical 
aspect of Green s conception of the self, it may be of interest to refc^r to 
Professor Muirhead s comments on Green's theorv of reality and his 
theology found in the volume. The Service of the State, pages n-i8 A 
portion of Professor Muirhead's words are these • 

''Stated in this condensed form, the doctrine of the 'timeless self of 
which our individual selves are 'reproductions' is open to manifold mis- 
understanding. Nor are Its difiiculties diminished by the examination of 
the passages in which Green develops it, where it becomes obvious that 
there is a certain vacillation in his own thought. By some he has been 
nn^i^/t-fi^Ki^"'"^ *°'!-^'''5 by others, of not going far enough: he makes an 
unjustifiable assumption in identifying the ultimate or absolute reality with 
Mind and Will ; and again he leaves us with a conception of the divine 
personality which excludes from it all movement, purpose, effort-all in 
a word, that is really characteristic of mind and will. . . It is ouite 
true that Green speaks of knowledge and good as something already 
achieved in the universal mind, and of God as 'a subject which is eternally 
alJ that the self-conscious subject as developed in time has the possibility 
Ahc I'T'"^.- ■ •• ■ ^"^ *'^"^ 'P'"^ °^ ^"^ teaching is to conceive of the 
.irMai'lI'^.r. ""' '",■'] ""^^^^ °^ 'f?^ contrasted with the movement and 
struggle of human life as something 'already existent' contrasted with 
a yet-to-be (this is to bring it under the conditions of time from which 
It IS expressly excluded) but as the deeper realitv of the life in time. And 

iVe's^'wll'l. r." ''?/• '■' ^T 5°"''^ ''-^ "^ '^^'■°"^h the element in our own 
lives ^which we call our highest purposes and ideals. There is nothincr 




. • ,v , — ....V,.. ,no iiniiiL 15 luciiiijicu It) mam- 

tain that we are unnecessary to the divine plan, or to denv that in knowl- 
edge as It may be realized by us a new result is achieved, new possibilities 
conie to light that out of the treasure house of the eternal are brought 
forth things that are at once old and new " 

" nnJi^'p'" I'f ^^'■^"'^^ "l^^y he'-e be made to Professor Dewey's article 
P^rhnl f'-P^'r'"'' P'-fl'^a Character?" in Essays Philosophical and 

Rsychological in Honor of William James, pages S3-102; James " Is Life 
c^a'tt Vllf '" ^^'" ^^^'^ '° ^''"^''- P'-^^- 32-62: Sturl Idola Theati^ 

*g|elf-Realization as the Moral Ideal, in Philosophical Rc-rieii.'. Vol. II, 
" Ibid., p. 662. 



CHAPTER IV 
SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 

The test of any system of philosophy, it has been said, is the 
account it gives of human institutions, — its interpretation and 
evaluation of the institutional life of the race. " What does it 
see in history, and the institutions of the family, civil society, 
the state, the church?"^ The present chapter will attempt to 
indicate the more outstanding features of what may be desig- 
nated Green's sociological theories. 

The types of thinking which determine the manner of view- 
ing the relation of the individual to society has atTected vitally 
the social tendencies of any period, its attitude toward institu- 
tions, — its attitude toward the interpretation of life. Certain 
historical forms which the theory of the nature of the social 
unity has assumed may be recalled in this connection. 

(i) According to what is sometimes designated the monistic 
or socialistic view, so-called ' Society ' is considered all iinpor- 
tant, and the individual is merely an instrument to be moulded 
by society. As a result, accordingly, we have a relatively static 
type of nationality, such as that of the China of a few decades 
ago, attempting to perpetuate its past practically in its complete- 
ness. The state is prior to the individual, the rights of the 
state are extolled, those of the individual minimized. 

(2) According to the monadistic or individualistic view, so- 
ciety is merely an aggregate, the rights of the individual alone 
are sacred, the state is merely a human convenience. 

(3) Again — according to the so-called dualist ic theory — the 
individual and society are viewed as two disparate factors, 
each struggling for priority. This is a type of thinking in large 
measure iir.plied in the struggle almost constantly going on 
between nationalism and local control, capital and labor. From 
another point of view it seems to imply that there exists an area 

^ Harris, The Logic of Hegel, p. 17. 

31 



3 2 The Educational Theory and Practice of T. H. Green 

in which the rights of the individual are inviolable: in another 
area those of society, 

(4) There is, further, the so-called organic view of the socie- 
tary process which attempts to adjust the claims of the indi- 
vidual and society more in conformity to facts. According to 
this view, society is more than a mere aggregate ; it is a natural 
process ; an individual has a certain independence and freedom 
won through identifying his interests with those of society. The 
ideal, the purpose, of society is conceived as immanent in the 
individual. There is a constant process of differentiation and 
integration, which results in a real, vital relationship not only 
between (a) the individual and society, or the individual and 
the group of individuals, but also between (b) the individual 
and individual. In the organic view the important thing in the 
social process is interrelation, interdependence, community. A 
study of Green's writings will indicate more fully, perhaps, in 
detail what is to be understood by this organic view of the rela- 
tion of the individual and society. 

In the fifth book of the " Ethics " Aristotle admits in a some- 
what tentative or hesitating way the possibility of a dualism in 
the conception of the good man and of the good citizen. " It 
is not, perhaps, the same thing in every case," says Aristotle, 
" to be a good man and to be a good citizen." Green would 
not find it in his power to admit even such a tentative dualism 
between true manhood and true citizenship — between what he 
could hold to be the impossible dualism of post-Aristotelian phil- 
osophy — man thought of simply as an abstract individual and 
man regarded as a member of a state. Both, to Green, would 
appear to be the outcome of an abstraction in ethical and political 
thinking. In like manner he cannot admit that any true oppo- 
sition between the individual and society, or as Spencer would 
have it, ' man versus the state ' is logically possible ; even the 
question so often debated at present and made the basis of so 
many theories in social and political thinking, — the question of 
the priority of the individual to society or of society to the 
individual appeared to Green not only insoluble but essentially 
meaningless. It will thus be evident what was the point of 
view from which Green would criticize the historic types of 
theory concerning the social unity enumerated above, — the mon- 
istic, the individualistic, and the dualistic. The error in such 



Social and Political Philosophy 33 

theories consists according to Green " in starting from parts 
taken in abstraction from the whole to which they belong." - 
The completer view, we can understand him as saying, must be 
based on an attempt to see the social situation — and the same 
may be as truly said of the knowledge-situation — in its total 
reality in the unity of its parts. Of reality, therefore, individual, 
social, cosmical, such a synoptic view must be taken : only to 
such a view does the truth of parts, their meaning, their signi- 
ficance, in a word, their function, disclose itself. For Green, 
then, the individual is a functional unity in a larger functional 
whole, and as such alone can be truly known. The individual's 
reality is then a reality of function. Society is the system of 
interacting functions: free and common action are ultimately 
identical : the normal individual life is the social life. In biolog- 
ical terminology, humanity, .society is, in the deepest sense, the 
vital organism of which individuals are the organs. 

" The condition of a moral life," says Green,-^ " is the pos- 
session of will and reason. Will is the capacity in a man of 
being determined to action by the idea of a possible satisfaction 
of himself. An act of will is an action so determined. A state 
of will is the capacity as determined by the particular objects 
in which the man seeks self-satisfaction ; and it becomes a char- 
acter in so far as the self-satisfaction is habitually sought in 
objects of a particular kind. Practical reason is the capacity 
in a man of conceiving the perfection of his nature as an object 
to be attained by action. All moral ideas have their origin in 
reason, i.e., in the idea of a possible self-perfection to be attained 
by the moral agent. This does not mean that the moral agent 
in every stage of his progress could state this idea to himself 
in an abstract form, any more than in every stage in the acquisi- 
tion of knowledge about nature a man can state to himself in 
an abstract form the conception of the unity of nature, which 
yet throughout conditions the acquisition of his knowledge. 
Ideas do not first come into existence or begin to operate, upon 
the formation of an abstract expression for them. This ex- 
pression is only arrived at upon an analysis of a concrete experi- 
ence, which they have rendered possible. Thus we only learn 
to express the idea of self-perfection in that abstract form upon 

^Muirhead. The Service of the State, p. 8. 

"Works, Vol. II, pp. 337-338. ItaHcs inserted by the writer. 



34 The Educational Theory and Practice of T. H. Green 

an analysis of an experience of self-improvement which we have 
ourselves gone through, and which must have been gone through 
by those with whom we are connected by the possession of lan- 
guage and an organization of life, however elementary: but the 
same analysis shows that the same idea must have been at work 
to make such experience possible. In this idea all particular 
moral ideas— all ideas of particular forms of conduct as estimable 
— originate, though an abstract expression for the latter is 
arrived at much sooner than such an expression for the idea in 
which they originate. They arise, as the individual's conception 
of the society on the well-being of which his own depends, and 
of the constituents of that well-being, becomes wider and fuller; 
and they are embodied in the laws, institutions, and social expec- 
tations, which make conventional morality. This embodiment, 
again, constitutes the moral progress of mankind. This progress, 
however, is only a moral progress in so far as it tends to bring 
about the harmony of will and reason, in the only form in which 
it can really exist, t//.c., in the characters of persons. And this 
result is actually achieved, in so far as upon habits disciplined 
by conformity to conventional morality there supervenes an in- 
telligent interest in some of the objects contributory to human 
perfection, which that conventional morality subserves, and ia 
so far as that interest becomes the dominant interest of the 
character." 

The value, then, of human institutions, according to Green, 
lies in their operation as giving reality to the capacities of will 
and reason, the possession of which is the condition of a moral 
life. So far as institutions operate in this way, so far as they 
enable a man to realize his reason, i.e., his idea of self-perfection, 
by acting as a member of a social organization " in which each 
contributes to the better being of all the rest " they are ethically 
and educationally justified. In their respective functions in the 
moralization and, therewith, the education of an individual, lies 
their ethical and educational significance and justification. 

The gradual actualization of the moral ideal is thus for Green 
disclosed in the institutional life of the race. The moral ideal 
and institutional life of the race, moreover, are in a continuous 
process of becoming. From the human side at least, the moral 
ideal and the human institutions in which the ideal is increas- 
ingly realized, are in the making. Institutions are the mechanism 



Social and Political Philosophy 35 

of the ideal : the ideal is the meaning, the progressively organ- 
izing life, the reconstructive principle within. 

Advancement, then, in the moral life is not gained in isolation, 
but only through " participation in the various forms of the 
ethical life — the home, the school, society, the state, the church. 
These are the instruments or organs vi^hich Reason has found 
to minister most effectively to the higher life of man. The 
individual makes his moral problem in the actual relationships 
of society." 

It will now be possible, perhaps, to indicate in a somewhat 
fuller, though in summary fashion, at first, Green's teaching 
concerning the ethical and educational significance of the objec- 
tive world of moral relations — the world, that is, of the moral 
institutions. 

( 1 ) Institutions are the actualization of the moral ideal — they 
are the precipitation, as it were, of the ideal. As from the 
structural point of view, the individual is composed of habits 
and accommodations, to use the psychological terms of Professor 
Baldwin, so society is composed of habits and accommodations. 
Habits in the individual are primarily organized capacities for 
action: institutions are the habits, so to speak, of society — they 
are organized capacities for action and the actualization of ends 
and ideals deemed desirable : they embody not only plans or 
methods of action learned by society, but also its purposes and 
ideals — its conceptions, its ideas, as ideals of a ' better ' than 
its ' best.' * " Institutions are the concrete embodiment of the 
complex interrelations of the social organism, and life itself is 
the ultimate justification of each citizen's obligation to support 
these institutions." "' 

(2) Institutions in a m.orc uncivilized or savage society, it 
is true, are more the product of instincts and habits than of 
reflection. As a society becomes more and more civilized, re- 
flection intervenes to a greater and greater extent in the methods 
of the conservation and the transmission of experience. Reflec- 
tion, after it has raised to consciousness the tendencies of social 
life, expressed in institutions, leaves the participants in such 



* See Bosanquct. The Philosophical Theory of the State, 2nd edition, 
chapter XI, " Institutions as Ethical Ideas." See also MacVannel, Hegel's 
Doctrine of the Will, chapter VIII, "The Ethical Life." 

^Fairbrother, The Philosophy of T. H. Green, p. 115. 



36 The Educational Theory and Practice of T. H. Green 

institutions on a higher level of social and moral experience in 
that the latter embody this reflection which has lifted them in 
reorganized social habits, which in turn become a basis for 
further reflection for the freedom and realization of that indi- 
vidual who identifies his good, whether consciously or uncon- 
sciously, with the good of society. Institutions, therefore, are 
a test of the moral progress of a society, for they are the out- 
ward expression of its morality. 

(3) Institutions are the dynamic elements within society — 
the " meeting-points for the functional activity of their mem- 
bers " — in other words, they constitute the system of the actual- 
ization of the functions of society as so far realized. It is 
through these institutions, moreover, that society aims to per- 
petuate itself, that society attempts to secure the service of the 
individual and to provide conditions for his realization. Since 
society is constituted through the distribution, conservation, and 
transmission of experience through its institutions, institutions 
serve " to link individuals to one another, and generations each 
to each." The idea of the good which is common to the indi- 
vidual desiring it with others yields " those institutions of the 
family, the tribe, and the state, which further determine the 
morality of the individual." ^ 

In his syllabus on the " Philosophy of Education '"' Dr. Mac- 
Vannel makes a statement of what he considers the two typical 
functions performed by institutions in human experience. This 
statement may be quoted in this connection in that, to the writer 
of this essay, it seems to summarize much that appears to be 
vital in Green's argument as developed in the " Prolegomena " 
and in the " Principles of Political Obligation." The statement 
is as follows : 

"i. They unify men. To unify men is to moralize them. In 
prescribing the general methods of response to social situations, 
institutions exercise an authority and control essential to the 
realization of the individual. They thus constitute a system 
of control, formative in the intellectual and moral development 
of the individual. Institutions are the expression of human 
interdependence; the realized idea of humanity. Herein is the 
ground of social obligation. In institutions is embodied the 
law imposed upon the actual self by the ideal self. To some 

' Prolegomena to Ethics, Sec. 286. 
' Pages 31-32. 



Social and Political Philosophy 37 

degree the outcome on the part of individuals of voluntary 
adaptation one to another, but for the most part emerging 
first of all without any far-reaching purpose, institutions have 
conserved the social order and provided the means for the 
realization of the individual. While it is freely admitted that 
in their development the ideal of the realization of the capacities 
of the human spirit was but seldom consciously presented, yet 
in the consciousness of man there must have supervened a uni- 
versal principle, which, however dimly, enabled him to set him- 
self up as an end to be realized, and to present to this con- 
sciousness persons other than himself. It is this universal 
principle in consciousness which, in the development and progress 
of the human race, has been the immanent life of individual 
and social activity. 

2. They transmit experience and thus preserve the continuity 
of the spiritual life of humanity. The doctrine of evolution 
maintains that nothing in the world is isolated : all is connected. 
There is nowhere atomism, but unity, relation, participation. Just 
as in nature truly seen, objects are closely united, and all de- 
pendent each on each, so are the generations of men united 
one to the other. Down through the ages there is this tide of 
spiritual life slowly accumulating, ever gathering in volume, 
wider, deeper, stronger. This fund of spiritual life, the slowly 
garnered experience of humanity, is civilization, and that which 
constitutes the environment of men. For the individual at 
birth, it is his spiritual inheritance. It becomes his spiritual 
possession in a large and fruitful way only through education. 
From the ethical, and, therefore, from the educational point of 
view civilization is the vicarious offering of the race to the 
individual to be used, if he will but appropriate it, for the 
perfecting of his nature, for the rich and varied expression of 
the personal life." 

From this analysis it is evident that for Green an individual 
apart from his relations — relations to nature, institutions, and 
the common good which is the real substance of the institutional 
life of man— is nothing ; he is a mere abstraction. Only as man 
becomes an organic part of the social whole, identifying his own 
interests with those of society, thus finding in society his greatest 
opportunity for freedom, growth and development, does he attain 
his own self-realization. Only in the presence of other human 
beings is the individual moralized: only thus is he educated: 
in this way alone does he become human and spiritual and free. 
Human institutions " are the concrete bodv with which the Moral 



38 TJie Educational Theory and Practice of T. H. Green 

Ideal is to be clothed." ^ In identification with and participation 
in this concrete body of human experience does the true life 
and development of the individual, and therevi^ith his education, 
move forward. " The value, then, of the institutions of civil 
life," to recall a significant principle already quoted, " lies in 
their operation as giving reality to these capacities of will and 
reason, and enabling them to be really exercised." Herein then 
is the ethical and educational significance of human institu- 
tions : this is their interrelated and co-operant service to the indi- 
vidual. In concluding the present chapter it remains to note 
the respective functions, according to Green, of the several insti- 
tutions ; in other words, to describe what may truthfully be 
designated Green's treatment of the sociological aspects of 
education. 

" No individual," says Green, " can make a conscience for 
himself. He always needs a society to make it for him " -p on 
the other hand he maintains : " No one can convey a good char- 
acter to another. Every one must make his character for him- 
self. All that one man can do to make another better is to 
remove obstacles, and supply conditions favorable to the forma- 
tion of a good character." ^" For Green as for Aristotle man's 
needs have been his salvation ; his ever-increasing wants have 
been the impulse to his progress. *' For," declared Aristotle, 
" as the state was formed to make life possible, so it exists to 
make life good." ^^ In a sense Green's entire political philosophy 
might be said to be a commentary on this doctrine of Aristotle 
adapted to modern life and modern conditions. The essence of 
Green's writings on politics might be summarized in a borrowed 
terminology. " For as human institutions were formed to make 
life possible, so they exist to make life good." 

Human rights and duties — family, civil society and church — 
the ethical substance of life in so far as it is social, are for 
Green made by recognition. " There is no right," he declares, 
" but thinking makes it so : none that is not derived from some 
idea men have about each other. Nothing is more real than 
a right, }et its existence is purely ideal, if by ' ideal ' is meant 

* Fairbrother, The Philosophy of T. H. Green, p. 11. 

" Prolegomena to Ethics, Sec. 321. 

^'Ibid., Sec. 332. 

"Politics, Bk. I, ch. 2 (Welldon irans.). 



Social and Political Philosophy 39 

that which is not dependent on anything material but has its 
being solely in consciousness." ^■- 

The family is the " primary nucleus of all human union and 
fellowship." " Like property and nationality, the modern idea 
of the family expresses a fundamental element in the social 
good." The family is a means of moralization : it is the primary 
factor in the education of the individual. " We saw," Green 
writes," " that appropriation of that kind, which when secured 
by a social power, becomes property, supposes an effort on the 
part of the individual to give reality to a conception of his own 
good, as a whole or as something permanent, in distinction from 
the mere effort to satisfy a want as it arises. The formation 
of family life supposes a like effort, but it also supposes that 
in the conception of his own good to which a man seeks to give 
reality there is included a conception of the well-being of others 
connected with him." " He must conceive of the well-being 
of these others as a permanent object bound up with his own, 
and the interest in it as thus conceived must be a motive to 
him over and above any succession of passing desires to obtain 
pleasure from, or give pleasure to, others." ^* 

The study of the genesis of the modern family, however in- 
teresting and valuable, does not give for Green its significance, 
its meaning, its higher purpose. The marriage contract is basic 
to the welfare not only of the family but of the state. The 
contract is legal but its significance is spiritual in that the agree- 
ment is betzveen persons, thereby making marriage an ethical 
relation and ' all rights reciprocal.' ^^' 

The worth of personality, therefore, is the foundation of 
Green's conception of the family, and, accordingly, if either party 
in the marriage is regarded not as an end, but as a means, the 
marriage ideal has been violated. " The history^" of the devel- 
opment of family life is the history of the process (a) by 
which family rights have come to be regarded as independent 
of the special custom of a clan and the special laws of a state, 
as rights which all men and women, as such, are entitled to. 
This, how^ever, characterizes the history of all rights alike. It 

"Works, Vol. II, pp. 446-4-47- 
" Ibid., Vol. II, p. 539- 
'*Ibid., Vol. II, p. S3Q. 
"Ibid.. Vol. II, p. "537. 
''Ibid., Vol. II, p. 5.41. 



40 The Educational Theory and Practice of T. H. Green 

is a history farther (b) of the process by which the true nature 
of these rights has come to be recognized, as rights over persons ; 
rights of which persons are the objects, and which therefore 
imply reciprocal claims on the part of those over whom they 
are exercised, and of those who exercise them. The establish- 
ment of monogamy, the abolition of ' patria potestas ' in its 
various forms, the ' emancipation of women ' (in the proper 
sense of the phrase), are involved in these two processes. The 
principles (i) that all men and women are entitled to marry 
and form households, (2) that within the household the claims 
of the husband and wife are throughout reciprocal, cannot be 
realized without carrying with them not merely monogamy, but 
the removal of those faulty relations between men and women 
which survive in countries where monogamy is established by 
law." 

" The family," says Mackenzie in the spirit of Green,^^ " is 
like a burning glass which concentrates human sympathies on 
a point. Within that narrow circle selfishness is gradually over- 
come and wider interests developed. The family enables a few 
persons to become not merely objects for each other, but parts 
of a single life; and the unity thus affected may then be very 
readily extended as sympathies grow." 

In that the school as a human institution organized for ' pro- 
viding the conditions of the good life ' will be spoken of more 
fully in the chapter following. Green's conception of the civic 
community, standing as it does between the family and the 
state, may here be indicated. The civic community is conceived 
to be " the union of independent individuals in a formal uni- 
versality for the security of private and common interests." 

Perhaps Green's treatment of property will best serve to illus- 
trate the principles fundamental to his conception of the civic 
community. " Property," for Green, " implies in a particularly 
striking form the idea of distinction between a permanent self 
and its passing state, which we have seen to lie at the founda- 
tion of man's whole intellectual and moral nature." ^^ 

" One condition of the existence of property," Green writes,^* 
" is appropriation, and that implies the conception of himself on 

" An Introduction to Social Philosophy, pp. 363-364. 
" Muirhead. The Service of the State, p. 94. 
"Works, Vol. II, pp. 519-520. 



Social and Political Philosophy 41 

the part of the appropriator as a j)ennanent subject for whose 
use, as instruments of satisfaction and expression, he takes and 
fashions certain external things, certain things external to his 
bodily members. These things, so taken and fashioned, cease 
to be external as they were before. They become a sort of 
extension of the man's organs, the constant apparatus through 
which he gives reality to his ideas and wishes. But another 
condition must be fulfilled in order to constitute property, even 
of the most simple and primitive sort. This is the recognition 
by others of a man's appropriations as something which they will 
treat as his, and not theirs, and the guarantee to him of his 
appropriations by means of that recognition." The basis of this 
recognition by others of a man's appropriation — the basis that 
constitutes a right to property — is not therefore, " the power of 
forcible tenure but the pozver of utilisation for social ends." -° 
" When this is absent," Green would maintain, " possession must 
be, and continue to be robbery ; where it once may have been, 
but has ceased any longer to be tenure may remain, but it 
remains as a mere survival, rightly liable at any moment to 
be challenged in the interest of the community, whose will has 
made and is necessary to sustain it." -^ " The general principle 
is, that property in its idea is a means (so far as can be seen, 
a necessary means) to the highest moral development." -- 

The same general principle, it may be added, is operative in 
Green's thought in regard to free trade. "All restrictions on 
freedom of wholesome trade," he writes,-" " are really based 
on special class interests and must disappear with the realization 
of that idea of individual right, founded on the capacity of every 
man for free contribution to social good, which is the true idea 
of the state." 

A statement of Green in reference to the enfranchisement of 
all Englishmen may be cited to substantiate further his funda- 
mental conception of the civic community. " We who were 
reformers from the beginning always said that the enfranchise- 
ment of the people was an end in itself. We said, and we were 
much derided for saying so, that only citizenship gives that self- 
respect which is the true basis of respect for others, and without 
which there is no lasting social order or real morality." 

"• " " Muirhead. The Service of the State, p. 79. 
"Works, Vol. II. p. 484. 



42 The Educational TJieory and Practice of T. H. Green 

"Ail virtues/" says Green in a striking passage, " are really 
social or, more properly, the distinction between social and 
self-regarding virtues is a false one. Every virtue is self-regard- 
ing in the sense that it is a disposition, or habit of will, directed 
to an end which the man presents to himself as his good ; every 
virtue is social in the sense that unless the good to which the 
will is directed is one in which the well-being of society in 
some form or other is involved, the will is not virtuous at all. 
The virtues are dispositions to exercise positively, in some way 
contributory to social good, those powers which, because ad- 
mitting of being exercised, society should secure to him; the 
powers which a man has the right to possess, which constitute 
his rights." 2* 

" It is only as members of a society, as recognizing common 
interests and objects, that individuals come to have these at- 
tributes and rights; and the power, which in a political society 
they have to obey, is derived from the development and systema- 
tization of those institutions for the regulation of a common 
life without which they would have no rights at all.-^ 
In analyzing the nature of any right, we may conveniently look 
at it on two sides, and consider it as on the one hand a claim 
of the individual, aiming out of his rational nature, to the free 
exercise of some faculty; on the other hand, as a concession of 
that claim by society, a power given by it to the individual of 
putting the claim in force. But we must be on our guard 
against supposing that these distinguishable rights have any really 
separate existence." -*' 

The state then, for Green, is the specific form which society 
takes in order to maintain the rights of individuals: it is that 
form of institutional life devised by society for maintaining 
and more and more securing the conditions of the good life for 
its members. It is an institution for the promotion of a common 
good through the adjustment and organization of the individuals 
who contribute to and participate in the common life of society. 
The conscious formulation of this problem of adjustment arose 
with Plato and Aristotle. It is the question fundamental in a 
sense to the " Republic " and to the " Politics " as well. It is cen- 

" Works Vol. II, p. S50 
"■'Ibid., Vol. II, p. 428.' 
^'Ibid.. Vol. II, p. 4C0. 



Social and Political Philosophy 43 

tral too in the writings of Kant and Hegel. In the modern period 
Hegel, perhaps, gave the problem its most adequate formula- 
tion. By him the state was defined as " society organized to 
insure that the individual shall be fully realized chiefly through 
his own conscious action." Freedom for Hegel was the vital 
union of the particular interests of the individual and the uni- 
versal aims of man. 

A study of English life in the nineteenth century shows that 
the people were struggling for a truer adjustment between the 
individual and society, between individual and individual. The 
various poor laws, factory laws, health laws, and even the edu- 
cational reforms of 1867 are all a manifestation of the growing 
tendency on the part of society to seek to improve by means 
of its specific method — the state — actual social conditions, and 
to secure to an increasing number of its members greater equaliz- 
ation of opportunity, the conditions of a better life, some share 
in what Green in one place speaks of as the claim of the modern 
spirit, — •" to be free, to understand, to enjoy." -' 

Just as Green had felt that the extension of the new knowl- 
edge in the England of his day rendered a reconsideration of 
the problem of moral philosophy imperative, so did he feel that 
the growth of political thought and the intensification of political 
activity rendered imperative also the reconsideration and re- 
organization of the political and social problem. In the " Pro- 
legomena to Ethics," then, is {)resented Green's interpretation 
of the " questions," as he says, " raised for us by the Moral 
Philosophy which in England v/e have inherited " :-^ in the " Lec- 
tures on the Principles of Political Obligation " he seeks to indi- 
cate the moral grounds upon wdiich the state is based and upon 
which obedience to the law of the state is justified. 

Society, for Green, is a group of individuals working together 
in common life. It is a community of moral agents — whose 
rights are made by recognition. The state and government are 
tendencies within common life organized as instruments or 
methods for securing rights to its individuals. — the freer exercise 
of faculty, the fuller opportunity to participate in the com- 
mon life. In society the individual becomes conscious of his 
capacity through its exercise as function operative in a social 

"Works, Vol. Ill, p. 94 (Popular Philosophy in its Relation to Life). 
^ Prolegomena to Ethics, Sec. 2. 



44 The Educational Theory and Practice of T. H. Green 

situation. The individuars rights, therefore, are due to the fact 
that he is a part of the social reality, and his responsibilities 
and duties consist in whatever is appropriate or necessary to the 
discharge of his function in the social process. " It is on the 
relation to a society," as he re-emphasized again and again, 
" to other men recognizing a common good, that the individual's 
rights depend, as much as the gravity of a body depends on 
relations to other bodies. A right is a power claimed and 
recognized as contributory to a common good.-" . . . The 
degree to which the individual judges for himself of the rela- 
tion between the common good and the laws which cross the 
path of his ordinary life, is the measure of his intelligent, as 
distinguished from a merely instinctive recognition of rights in 
others and in the state; and on this recognition again depends 
his practical understanding of the difference between mere powers 
and rights as recognized by himself." ^'' 

In discussing the problem of the citizen's rights against the 
state, Green maintains that the individual has " no right to dis- 
obey the law of the state except in the interest of the state." ^^ 
The smuggler, no matter how unjust the tarifif law, acts not for 
the interest of the state, but for his own class interest and 
therefore cannot on the principles deduced by Green justify his 
action against the state, even though Green believes that " all 
restrictions on freedom of wholesome trade are really based on 
special class interests, and must disappear with the realization 
of that idea of individual right, founded on the capacity of 
every man for free contribution to the social good, which is 
the tiaie idea of the state." ^- In like manner the parent who 
disobeys the compulsory education law cannot justify himself. 
Furthermore, the state, in compulsory education acts as the 
enforcer of rights, thus fulfilling its function. " To educate 
one's children," says Green,^^ " is no doubt a moral duty, and 
it is not one of those duties, like that of paying debts, of which 
the neglect directly interferes with the rights of someone else. 
It might seem, therefore, to be a duty with which positive law 
should have nothing to do, any more than with the duty of 

=nVorks, Vol. II, p. 416. 
""Ibid., pp. 416-417. 
'''/6/J.,p. 453. 
'= Ibid., p. 484. 
""Ibid., p. 515. 



Social and Political Philosophy 45 

striving after a noble life. On the other hand, the neglect of 
it does tend to prevent the growth of the capacity for beneficially 
exercising rights on the part of those whose education is 
neglected, and it is on this account, not as a purely moral duty 
on the part of a parent, but as the prevention of a hindrance 
to a capacity for rights on the part of children, that education 
should be enforced by the state." 

In securing for society, therefore, the conditions for the fur- 
therance of the good life through the removal of obstacles and 
hindrances the state enables the individual (a) to be gradually 
revealed to himself, (b) to be liberated from himself. These 
are the functions, according to Green, of the state in the growth 
and development — in a word, in the education of the individual. 

A deep religious interest and spirit tends to unify all of 
Green's thinking and writing. From a philosophical viewpoint 
the fundamental thought in his theory of reality is that reality 
forms " a spiritual cosmos implying and manifesting itself as 
' eternal consciooisness.' " The world man knows and man 
himself are but manifestations of this eternal consciousness, 
which is therefore the source of both man and the world he 
knows — an eternal consciousness that is the organism, as it were, 
of which both man and nature or environment are the organs. 
Furthermore, this eternal consciousness is a self-distinguishing 
consciousness whose quality of self-consciousness may be com- 
pared on a small scale to the part we exercise in acquiring 
knowledge. 

" We know not why," writes Green,"* " the eternal subject 
of that world should reproduce itself through certain processes 
of the world, as the spirit of mankind, or as the particular self 
of this or that man in whom the spirit of mankind operates. 
We can only say that, upon the best analysis we can make of 
our experience, it seems that so it does." But that the divine 
principle is a personality existing outside of the individual or 
" that in thus reproducing itself it remains an ' abstract ' self, 
apart from the desires, feelings, and thoughts of the individual 
man, is just the notion we seek to set aside." •'•' 

For Green, accordingly, all forms of expression of what is 
most fundamental in religion are inadequate. Nevertheless " it 

"* Prolegomena to Ethics, Sec. 100. 



46 The Educational Theory and Practice of T. H. Green 

is not the reality of God or of the ideal law of conduct that is 
in question, but the adequacy of our modes of expressing them. 
We may be passing through a period of transition from one 
mode of expressing them to another, or perhaps to an admission 
of their final ineffableness. Whatever we do, let us not make 
the difficulties of the transition an excuse for concessions to the 
spirit of self-indulgence." ^^ 

The " Church has been the witness of Christ in anotlier than 
the conventional sense : not as the depository of a dogma reflect- 
ing but faintly that original intuition of the crucified and risen 
one, in the light of which the blind Saul saw the barrier between 
Jew and Gentile, between man and God, disappear; but as the 
slowly articulated expression of the crucified and risen life. 
. . . We must not confound the formula with the reality. 
Dogmatic theology is quite other than Christian life. . . . 
For the truth of any practical idea the only possible evidence 
is its realization. . . . Who is there that has not known a 
simple, self-denying Christian, and known that if he would, he 
might become like him? Perhaps, wrapped closely in the fleece 
of conceit, we think lightly of such an one. He is not clever, 
or he has awkward manners, or a mean appearance. His bodily 
presence is weak and his speech contemptible. Yet his daily 
life is to him, as it might be to us if we would assimilate it, 
that sufficient evidence of God's quickening spirit, for the lack 
of which perhaps we are all the while passionately bewailing 
ourselves. In little, and on a narrow stage — no wider, it may 
be, than the duties of a sickly teasing household can aflford— he 
is exhibiting that power of the resurrection which still sends 
healing to the broken-hearted, deliverance to the captives and 
recovery of sight to the blind; which sends the missionary to 
the heathen, the preacher to the poor, the honest student to his 
struggle with the delusions of sense; because it is the spring 
of that charity which seeketh not her own and rejoiceth in the 
truth." " 



'' Works, Vol. Ill, p. 276. 

"" Ibid., pp. 236-238 (Extracts from "The Witness of God"). 



CHAPTER V" 

ASPECTS OF GREEN'S EDUCATIONAL THEORY AND 
PRACTICE 

" I confess to hoping for a time when that phrase (' the edu- 
cation of a gentleman ') will have lost its meaning, because the 
sort of education which alone makes the gentleman in any true 
sense will be within the reach of all. As it was the aspiration 
of Moses that all the Lord's people should be prophets, so with 
all seriousness and reverence we may hope and pray for a con- 
dition of English society, in which all honest citizens will recog- 
nize themselves and be recognized by each other as gentlemen. 
If for Oxford our high school contributes in its measure, as I 
believe it will, to win this blessed result, some sacrifice of labor 
and money, even the most difficult sacrifice, the sacrifice of party- 
spirit, may be fairly asked for in its support." ^ 

Perhaps no better explanation of Green's social ideal could be 
given than is to be found in these words taken from his last 
publication, — and what was practically his last public utterance — 
words spoken in behalf of the establishment of a high school in 
his own town. In his early essay on " Loyalty," written when he 
was an undergraduate at Oxford, Green had put forth this item 
as part of his social creed: " Recognizing the duty owed by all 
to the supreme power and common good of the state, the loyal 
man is bound to his fellow-citizens in the unity of a common 
object, which gives to the private pursuits of his daily life 
their value and spiritual meaning." Looking back over Green's 
life and work, his ethical and political theories, his continuous 
striving towards the application of ideas to life, the impression 
is left upon one of the ' rounded completeness ' of his life as 
scholar and citizen. 

" Man, above all the modern man. must theorize his prac- 

' Works, Vol. Ill, pp. 475-476 (Lecture on "The Work to be done by 
the new Oxford High School for Boys"). 

47 



48 The Educational Theory and Practice of T. H. Green 

tice, and the failure adequately to do so, must cripple the prac- 
tice itself." - 

It is true perhaps that Green did not write a philosophy of 
education ' strictly so-called.' His entire philosophy, however, 
as was suggested in the first chapter and implied in those that 
intervene, may be spoken of as his attempt towards a philosophy 
of experience, which after all is an attempt toward a philosophy 
of education in what is, perhaps, its most fundamental sense. 
He did not formulate in so many words a statement of his 
educational ideal, yet he seems throughout his writings to have 
been reflecting upon the conditions necessary to such a formu- 
lation. Throughout his published works he insists that we can- 
not say what man ought to be until some examination be made— 
the more thorough-going the examination, the better^f what 
man is. 

While, then, it is true that Green did not set forth in any 
final fashion his social or educational ideal, the words quoted 
above seem best to express his creed in social philosophy— an 
ideal in the realization of which he regarded education as a 
significant, if not the most significant factor. As a statement 
of his educational ideal, on the other hand, it would appear 
that words already quoted,^ might well be employed— words 
used by Green to express what to him were the essential forms 
in tvhich the will for true good (zvhich is the zvill to be good) 
must appear. 

" It is the will," writes Green, " to know what is true, to 
make what is beautiful, to endure pain and fear, to resist the 
allurements of pleasure (i.e., to be brave, and temperate), if 
not, as the Greek would have said, in the service of the State, 
yet in the interest of some form of human society ; to take for 
oneself, to give to others, of those things which admit of being 
taken and given, not what one is inclined to. but what is due." 

Without going beyond or contrary to the spirit of Green's 
writings in ethics, psychology and logic, it would be quite pos- 
sible to organize a body of ideas concerning the process of 
experience, serving to indicate what might be. regarded as his 
treatment of educational theory in its ethical, psychological and 
logical asp ects. Although the purpose and the limits assumed 

'Works, Vol. Ill, p. 124. 
'Supra, pp. 26-27. 



Aspects of Green's Educational Theory and Practice 49 

in tlie beginning of this essay relative to its purpose make such 
organization for the present impractical, nevertheless it seems 
worth while to indicate in briefest outline what appear to the 
writer some of the more important topics which might well be 
included in such a further development as that suggested. The 
topics which suggest the possibility of fuller organization and 
illustration — in their educational significance and applicability — 
may be outlined as follows : ( i ) The possibility of education and 
the distinction between education and learning; (2) Self-activity 
and self-realization; (3) The concept of environment or 'social 
medium'; (4) The concept of experience; (5) Knowledge and 
action: thought and will; (6) Educative material and methods; 
(7) Moral and religious education; (8) Principles of educational 
administration: education and the state. 

Attention was called in an earlier chapter* to the main features 
and evidences of Green's interest and activity in educational 
affairs in the England of his day. Beyond the directing atten- 
tion to his interest in and his endeavors in behalf of the practical 
educational situation of the time, it is believed that his attitude 
to the topics on which his thought focussed from time to time 
may best be conveyed through excerpts from his own writings — 
from reports or from addresses — made on occasion from his 
early manhood to the close of his career. 

Even though as a matter of fact Green's " teaching power 
was almost entirely spent in a university, his strongest sympa- 
thies were zvith the education of the middle classes, whom the 
universities were just beginning to touch. An undercurrent of 
indignant pity for the intellectual condition of these classes per- 
vaded his writings." ^ In contrasting the situation in reference 
to the education of the poor and of the middle class Green 
wrote :" 

" For a single man to be found having views about better 
education for the middle class, a hundred may be found having 
views about the education of the poor." 

" I was then^ looking forward, in common with many of 
those with v/hom I associated at Oxford, to a reconstitution at 

* Stipra, pp. 15-16. 
' Works, Vol. Ill, p. Ivi. 
'Ibid., p. Ivii. 

' Referring to the period eleven years previous when he was employed 
" as servant of the Schools Inquiry Commission." 



50 The Educational Theory and Practice of T. H. Green 

no very distant time, of the middle and higher education of 
England, and, as I need not be asliamed to add, if not to a 
reconstitution of society through that of education, yet at 
least to a considerable change in its tone and to the removal 
of many of its barriers. We thus looked forward, it will be 
said, because, while we knew something of universities, we knew 
very little of the world outside them. And this is probably true. 
The high hopes, indeed, which were then entertained, were not 
confined to young enthusiasts, for they inspired projects em- 
bodied in the report of the Endowed Schools Commissioners 
themselves, and were popularized in Professor Huxley's picture 
of a ' ladder of learning,' which should reach from the gutter 
to the universities; but they seemed destined to wait a long 
while for their fulfilment. It is eight years since the committee 
reported, and as yet we have seen no adequate results of their 
labors. It soon appeared that their recommendations were a 
long way ahead of popular sentiment ; or, more properly, that 
there was no developed popular knowledge or opinion on the 
subject with which they dealt, strong enough to countervail 
tlie vested interests which the enactment of these recommenda- 
tions, as a connected system, at least seemed to threaten. They 
thus did not fall within the very limited range in which practical 
politicians move. There was no statesman for whom it was 
worth while, or who had the leisure if he had the inclination, 
to push the scheme for reorganizing our superior education 
through in detail. The head that conceived it could not also 
command the hand to execute it. The fortune of English life 
has always been celebrated for putting the round man into the 
square hole, and in this case having excluded the author of the 
scheme in question from the possibility of becoming a minister 
of education, it made him a bishop in the most backward corner 
of England." ^ 

The " Lecture on the Grading of Secondary Schools " from 
which the preceding extract is taken was delivered to the Birm- 
ingham Teachers Association and published in The Journal of 
Education. I\Iay, 1877. The lecture opens with the words, 
" Eleven years ago I was employed for some weeks in Birming- 
ham as servant of the Schools Inquiry Commission." Green 
had written a special report on King Edward's Schools of the 
'Works, Vol. Ill, pp. 387-38S (On the Grading of Secondary Schools). 



Aspects of Green's Educational Theory and Practice 5 1 

city. The headmaster wrote afterwards concerning Green's 
work :'■* " There are two questions on which he took a decided 
line and rendered conspicuous service during his too short con- 
nection with the school ; these were the grading of the schools 
of the foundation, and the improvement of the position of the 
masters and mistresses — Professor Green did not live to see these 
schools at work, but their success has fully justified the wisdom 
of his plans. In the report which he made as assistant com- 
missioner, he had written very strongly of the inadequate 
remuneration of the assistant masters of the Birmingham schools. 
Something had already been done to remedy this defect, but 
it was not till he became a governor that the whole question was 
fully and fairly dealt with, and the improved position which the 
staff has since enjoyed is mainly due to his firmness and tact. 
. . . Professor Green's influence on the governing body was 
very remarkable. Some people in Birmingham were at first 
disposed to regard with suspicion and jealousy the intrusion, 
as it was deemed, of the representative governors, most of them 
residents at a distance; but such feelings were soon disarmed 
by his ready perception of local wants, his unwearied attention 
to his duties, and, above all, his personal worth and goodness." 
One of the controlling principles of Green's ethical and political 
philosophy and accordingly of his social and educational theory 
and practice is the conception of the good as something not 
merely personal but social. A working hypothesis of all his 
theory and practice was the unity of personal realization and 
social service. The notion of the unity of the individual and 
social good was the central and controlling one in his thought 
and practice in education. He would advocate, accordingly, 
such a system of administration as " would at once meet the 
aspiration of the few and raise that of the many. It would 
spread its net to catch boys who want a commercial education, 
and having caught them, while it gave them what they wanted, 
would, by a process of natural selection, keep for the higher 
learning all who were fit for it. It would bring every boy of 
capacity by the age of fourteen or so in contact with the mind 
of a scholar, and familiarize him with the prospect of an intel- 
lectual career." 



'Works, Vol. Ill, pp. Iv-h 



52 The Educational Theory and Practice of T. H. Green 

" Common education," Green contended, " is a true social 
leveller." Speaking of the meaning which the term ' education 
of a gentleman ' had come to have in England, he writes : " It 
seems chiefly to indicate a kind of manner and tone of feeling 
acquired by those educated at the miscalled ' public schools ' 
. . . . I do not depreciate the value of this manner and tone 
of feeling, but I regret that it should be a mark of social dis- 
tinction. Whatever is really of value in it should be char- 
acteristic of all men of liberal education. . , . A properly 
organised system of schools would level up without levelling 
down. It would not make the gentleman any the less of 
a gentleman in the higher sense of the term, but it would 
cure him of his unconscious social insolence just as it 
would cure others of social jealousy. It would heal the 
division between those who look complacently down on 
others as vulgar, and those who angrily look up to others as 
having the social reputation they themselves have not, uniting 
both classes by the free-masonry of a common education." ^'^ 
This " belief in the essential equality of men," writes Edward 
Caird in the Preface to the Memorial Volume already men- 
tioned," " might, indeed, be said to be one of the things most 
deeply rooted in his character, though it showed itself not in 
any readiness to echo the commonplaces of Radicalism, but 
rather in an habitual direction of thought and interest to prac- 
tical schemes for ' levelling up ' the inequalities of human lot, 
and giving to the many the opportunities." " We hold fast 
to the faith," Green had written in early manhood,^- *' that the 
' cultivation of the masses,' which has for the present superseded 
the development of the individual, will in its maturity produce 
some higher type even of individual manhood than any which 
the old world has known. We may rest on the same faith in 
tracing the history of literature. In the novel we must admit 
that the creative faculty has taken a lower form than it held 
in the epic and the tragedy. But since in this form it acts on 
more extensive material and reaches more men, we may well 
believe that this temporary declension is preparatory to some 
higher development, when the poet shall idealize life without 

" Works. Vol. Ill, pp. 459-460. 
^ Supra, p. 17. 

"Works. Vol. Ill, p. 45 (An estimate of the Value and Influence of 
Fiction). 



Aspects of Green's Educational Theory and Practice 53 

making abstraction of any of its elements, and when the secret 
of existence, which he now speaks to the inward ear of a few, 
may be proclaimed on the house-tops to the common intelligence 
of mankind." 

Green's entire endeavor in theory and practice appears to have 
been to vindicate the essential reasonableness of the claim of the 
modem spirit — ' to be free, to understand, to enjoy.' "It is 
a claim,'' he says,^^ " which is constantly becoming more articu- 
late and conscious of itself. It is constantly being heard from 
new classes of society, and penetrating more deeply into the 
circumstances of life. . . . The age, we may say, has over- 
talked itself : yet to prescribe a regimen of silence is but to 
mock the disease." " Green substantially accepted what we 
might call the great magna charta of democracy, as this stands 
written in the philosophy of Kant. . . . That every person 
possesses a worth and dignity which forbids his exploitation for 
political or any other ends — this is the doctrine of Green as it 
is of Kant."" 

The philosophy of Green thus takes its place as a vindication 
in the growing social democracy of England, of the right of 
every human being to an education according to his capacity. 
A right, it was shown in Chapter IV, presupposes a capacity 
judged not from the standpoint of origin but from that of 
destiny — thus making the basis of rights that ivhich men have 
in them to become. Rights then become merely opportunities — 
yet opportunities ever bearing with them their consequent re- 
sponsibilities to the society which alone gives meaning to oppor- 
tunity — in which members of society struggle in striving for the 
common good. Without the right to an education the child lacks 
the opportunities which are the very basis of his moral develop- 
ment — his participation in the common good. A child's rights 
are in proportion to what there is in him to become. This in- 
dicates an educational democracy — a school democracy of equal 
opportunity. 

Such a conception based on a principle fundamentally moral 
seems to contribute the basis of a theory of educational adniin- 
istration. 'right' according to 'capacity': along with the 
right, the ever-developing and. consequently, justifying sense of 

" Works, Vol. III. p. 94. 

" MacCunn, Six Radical Thinkers, p. 248. 



54 The Educational Theory and Practice of T. H. Green 

social responsibility. " Things and actions," said Bishop But- 
ler, " are what they are, and the consequences will be what they 
will be; why then should we desire to be deceived?" The only 
idealism valid for Green was of that type which trusts, not to a 
guess about what is beyond experience, but to an analysis of 
what is within it." " The fact that there is a real external 
world of which through feeling we have a determinate experi- 
ence, and that in this experience all our knowledge of nature 
is implicit, is one which no philosophy disputes. The idealist 
merely asks for a further analysis of a fact which he finds so 
far from simple." ^^ " The theory of a fact," says Muirhead, 
" is only the fact more thoroughly realized." ^^ That a teacher, 
for example, teaches well a certain process, as the division of 
decimals, is a fact; when she comes to realize how and why she 
taught well, she understands much better the fact of her success. 
It is a different fact for her, " a clearer fact, a deeper fact, a 
more vital fact." What she has " done in trying to understand 
it is to vitalize the fact, to bring it home " to herself, " to as- 
similate it." ^' 

Educational theory is not an effort, therefore, to digress from 
facts ; it is an attempt to get closer to them by showing them 
in their broader setting and relations, and thus revealing their 
meaning. In the present age of specialization which extends 
even to the field of education, there is the danger of one man 
seeing the facts of his own particular line of work without 
realizing their significance in the whole of reality, and thus there 
is the possibility of his conceiving his own little share in the 
whole as if it were the zvhole. This may account at least partially 
for the fact that many special school supervisors can see nothing 
except the special subjects which they are supervising, and can- 
not therefore adjust these subjects with any sense of proportion 
to the rest of the curriculum. 

Furthermore, educational theory urges upon us the necessity 
of seeing the process of school education in the light of the 
whole of life, " to see it from the point of view of its signifi- 
cance, its significance for life in general." ^^ There is a tendency 
in our educational thinking to be one-sided and partial. " The 

" Works, Vol. I. p. 376. 

" Muirhead, Philosophy and Life, p. 7. 

" Ibid., p. 7- 

''Ibid., p. II. 



Aspects of Green's Educational Theory and Practice 55 

ordinary antitheses we meet with in every day " so-called edu- 
cational " literature tend to cause a certain one-sidedness in our 
views of things and to keep us out of sight of the whole truth. "^'' 
To paraphrase somewhat the words-" of Professor Muirhead: 
" Philosophy (of education) is a life-long conflict with one-sided 
ideas. It is the effort to see things in their connection, to see 
things as a whole, to get rid of what Hegel calls ' soulless 
abstractions,' to get at the concrete thing; and the concrete 
thing, as we have seen, is the thing not in its crude form in 
which it first presents itself to us, but in the form in which it 
has been penetrated by our thought — made our own by having 
thought it through." 

" Rules are practical; they are habitual zvays of doing things. 
But principles are intellectual; they are usefid methods of judg- 
ing things." This then is felt by the writer to constitute the 
essential value of Green's theory of experience — whether of life 
or of education. It does not supply a set of prescriptions for 
action : it seems to supply certain standpoints and methods which 
may enable an individual to make for himself a working analysis 
for the educational situation in the ' concrete situations ' in 
which he finds himself.-^ 



" Muirhead, Philosophy and Life, p. 12. 
"/fciJ,. p. 13. 
^' Supra, pp. 5-6. 



CHAPTER VI 
CONCLUSION 

In concluding the present essay it seems worth while to indi- 
cate briefly certain principles which appear to have been con- 
tinually operative in the ethical and social theory and practice 
of Green, and which would appear also to be of permanent 
interest and value. 

I. His work constitutes a continual endeavor both in theory 
and practice to adhere to the facts of experience. Green was 
ever anxious to base his idealism on actual conditions as given 
in experience. In his first course of professional lectures, de- 
livered in the summer of 1878, he insists upon the relativity of 
both theory and practice to ' what is given in experience.' " It 
is agreed," he writes, " that all which exists for us is what is 
given in experience, but we speak of experience as depending 
on real things or objects or an order of nature." ^ Caird in 
the preface already spoken of^ refers at some length to Green's 
regard for facts : he speaks of him as a man " who scarcely 
felt that he had a scientific right to any principle which he had 
not submitted to a testing process of years, and who never 
satisfied himself — as men of ideastic tendencies are too apt to 
satisfy themselves — with an intuitive grasp of any comprehensive 
idea, until he had vindicated every element of it by the hard 
toil of an exhaustive reflection. Hence he was almost painful 
in the constancy of his recurrence to certain fundamental 
thoughts, which he never seemed to have sufficiently verified 
and explained, and which he was ever ready to reconsider in 
the light of new objections, even those that might seem to be 
comparatively unimportant to others. In this he showed how 
a deep faith in certain principles may be united with the ques- 
tioning temper of science, and even with the scrupulous scepti- 



nVorks. Vol. II, p. 85. 
^ Supra, p. 17. 

56 



Conclusion 57 

cism which is ever ready to go back to the beginning, that it 
may exhaust everything that can be said against them." 

In the early essay of 1858, " The Force of Circumstances," is 
to be found a unique demand for the adequate recognition by 
the individual of the actual fact or condition of things — the 
force of circumstances. With this demand is coupled the au- 
thor's statement of the way whereby reconciliation is possible. 
While he insists that " the chain of cause and effect cannot be 
shufiled off," yet " it may bind us to heaven instead of to earth ; 
the force of circumstances cannot be evaded, but it may become 
a power of good instead of evil." ^ And the four lectures on 
" The English Revolution " had their purpose, says Professor 
Muirhead, in showing " how the greatest concentration and 
purity of moral purpose may fail when they are dissociated from 
insight into the actual circumstances of the time." ^ 

2. Green maintained that philosophy is dependent for its ma- 
terial on human experience. Its task is the organization of the 
principles which inhere in experience and render it possible. 
Though at times experience seems to exist in a number of 
apparently separate and separately originated parts, nevertheless 
philosophy for Green existed to remove their separateness and 
to effect their organization. Philosophy itself must reorganize 
itself, prepared for its historic task of unifying the varieties 
of human experience. Green discerned, says Professor Muir- 
head, that the mistake of the popular British philosophy often- 
time consisted in " starting from parts in abstraction from the 
whole to which they belong. The correction must be to insist 
upon the wholeness or unity of life and experience as the only 
means of understanding the parts. This he held, must be the 
keynote of the new philosophy, the master-light of all its seeing."^ 
This principle, so continually urged by Green, would seem im- 
perative also in the reconstruction now taking place in educa- 
tional theory. 

3. What may be called Green's ethical and political prag- 
matism, moreover, seems worthy of attention in the present 
social and educational situation. What is to be our true attitude 
to those things within society which we are wont to regard 

' Works. Vol. Ill, p. 6. 

■* Muirhead, The Service of the State, p. 62. 

'^Ibid., p. g. 



58 The Educational Theory and Practice of T. H. Green 

as fixed ' institutions ' ? '* The value of the institutions of civil 
life," says Green, " lies in their operation as giving reality to 
the capacities of will and reason and enabling them to be really 
exercised. ... So far as they do in fact thus operate they are 
morally justified." '^ Such is Green's criterion of the fitness for 
survival among institutions. 

4. For Green the justification of the worth of life seems to 
have consisted in its affording to the individual an educational 
opportunity — an opportunity for the attainment not of something 
external to the self but in the self's realization — the realization 
of the highest and best that the self has within it to become. 
" That the self, as we conceive it, is in a certain sense ' mysteri- 
ous ' we admit. It is in a sense mysterious that there should 
be such a thing as a world at all. The old question, why God 
made the world, has never been answered, nor will be. We 
know not why the world should be; we only know that there 
it is. In like manner we know not why the eternal subject 
of that world should reproduce itself, through certain processes 
of the world, as the spirit of mankind, or as the particular self 
of this or that man in whom the spirit of mankind operates. 
We can only say that, upon the best analysis we can make of 
our experience, it seems that so it does. That in thus repro- 
ducing itself, however, it remain an ' abstract ' self, apart from 
the desires, feelings and thoughts of the individual man, is just 
the notion we seek to set aside." ' 

To Green the life of the self, its realization, certainly appeared 
as a real struggle and felt, to use Professor James's phrase, ' like 
a real fight.' The impression one gains from his work— in 
theory and practice — is that he would have been willing to 
accept the words of James in the latter's justification of the 
worth of living. " For my own part," wrote Professor James, 
" I do not know what the sweat and blood and tragedy of this 
life means, if they mean anything short of this. If this life be 
not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the 

"Works, Vol. II. pp. 338-339- Cf. Bosanquet. The Philosophical Theory 
of the State, ch. XI, " Institutions as Ethical Ideas." Also cf. the writ- 
ings of D. G. Ritchit, a student and disciple of Green: i. The Principles 
of State Interference; 2. Natural Rights; 3. Darwinism and Politics; 
4. Studies in Political and Social Ethics ; 5. Philosophical Studies. 
Prolegomena to Ethics, Sec. 100. 



Conclusion 



59 



universe by success, it is no better than a game of private 
theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels 
like a real fight, — once more it is a case of maybe." ^ 

5. In the preceding paragraph it was indicated how Green 
conceived all educational endeavor with a view to life, and, on 
the other hand, all the experiences of life from the standpoint 
of their educational significance. The educational process ap- 
peared to him as a continual process of adjustment or recon- 
ciliation of man with his environment — a reconciliation to be 
attained by man through thought and aspiration, through work 
and struggle.® 

" The man," then, " to whom nature has become human, who 
has recognized either a kingdom of God or a power of eternal 
death within himself, who has found in a free state not a 
mere organization for satisfying his wants, but an object of 
interest identical with his interest in himself, has already for 
himself answered the question whether it is he that is natural 
or nature that is spiritual." 

6. The method of personality is perhaps the ultimate in edu- 
cational theory. One feels that the philosophy of T. H. Green 
was an expression of the inmost meaning of his life. It was 
also his highest service to his generation. " Recognizing the 
duty," he wrote in the early essay on " Loyalty " already referred 
to, '" owed by all to the supreme power and common good of 
the state, the loyal man is bound to his fellow-citizens in the 
unity of a common object, which gives to the private pursuits 
of his daily life their value and spiritual meaning." ' The unity 
of a common object, which gives to the private pursuits of his 
daily life their value and spiritual meaning ' — herein lay the 
moral idealism of Green — the ' master-light of all his seeing ' — 
and doing. Once he had chosen, he followed the leadership, 
apparently, of the one whose career he sketches in ** The Frag- 
ment on Immortality," — the one who " lets the world have its 
way ; not from the hopelessness of the sceptic or the indifference 

"James, The Will to Believe, p. 61. 

' See, for example, Green's treatment in the early essay, " The Force of 
Circumstances," in which he speaks of the broken harmonies between man 
and his environment, and his interpretation of their educational signifi- 
cance. " Few attain," he writes, " to the final conquest. The greater 
portion even of the better sort of men are in a kind of middle state, half 
creatures and half the creators of circumstances." Works, Vol. Ill, p. 7. 



6o The Educational Theory and Practice of T. H. Green 

of the epicurean, but because he knows that his own way, how- 
ever lamely and blindly he pursues it, is yet that to which all 
the world's ways converge, and that it is the way that leadeth 
unto eternal life." 



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Baldwin: 
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Craik : 
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by Andrew Seth and R. B. Holdane.) 
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6i 



62 The Educational Theory and Practice of T. H. Green 



Ritchie: 



RoYCE : 
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SiDGWICK ; 



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WiNDELBAND 



Philosophical Studies. 

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M 15 vn 



One copy del. to Cat. Div. 



JAN ?5 1^12 



i'.?^.^^^ O"" CONGRESS. 



.0 019 847 804