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A THESIS
PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSO 25 J V
By
HARVEY GATES TOWNSEND, A.B.
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THE PRINCIPLE OF
INDIVIDUALITY IN THE PHILOSOPHY
OF THOMAS HILL GREEN
A THESIS
PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
BY
HARVEY GATES TOWNSEND, A.B.
PRESS OF
THE NEW ERA PRINTING COMPANY
LAN LASTF.R., PA.
PREFACE.
IN this monograph no attempt will be made to deal with
Green's ethical or political theories, the purpose being rather to
examine and define the deeper lying metaphysical principles of
which his ethical and political philosophy is but the expression.
Such an aim is in keeping with the spirit of Green's philosophy,
for he himself tells us that a metaphysic of morals is “the proper
foundation, though not the whole, of every system of Ethics”
(Prolegomena to Ethics, sec. 2.) It is common enough to deny
that there is any vital connection between ethics and meta-
physics, and this opinion was probably just as common when
Green wrote as it is today, as the Introduction to the Pro-
legomena clearly shows. With the arguments again which may
be brought in support of either side of this question the present
study is not concerned; for however such a controversy may
eventuate in the abstract, we are not at liberty when we discuss
Green's ethics to neglect his own view of the matter. For if
he believed, as he most certainly did, that his ethics was inti-
mately and organically bound up with his metaphysics, we
would be greatly increasing our chances of failure to understand
his ethics by a refusal to study his metaphysics. A lack of
deep appreciation of the metaphysics has, I believe, vitiated a
great deal of the criticism of the later, and perhaps more dog-
matic parts of Green's system. Taking the position that he
did, he had a right to assume that his reader would become
familiar with his metaphysics and, in case of a disagreement,
that the discussion would embrace a consideration of meta-
physical principles rather than confine itself to a disputation
about rules of morality from the uncritical or factual stand-
point of ordinary life. It is, therefore, of the greatest importance
for the understanding of Green's philosophy that we first become
acquainted with the principles of his metaphysics.
Green's social theory, which includes the application of his
philosophy to moral, political, educational, or religious situa-
iii
282037
1V PREFA CE.
tions, reveals throughout a philosophic or speculative motive.
He was not one of those who seem content to live from hand to
mouth in philosophy, lost in the flux of experience as it comes;
but he was above all anxious to ‘see life steadily and to see it
whole.’ A fragment was never to him a mere piece of something
or other to be accepted unreflectingly, but it was a challenge
which set his mind to reconstruct the concrete whole of which it
is a part, and it led him ultimately to a view of the whole uni-
verse. It is this motive in his philosophy with which we are
here concerned. What did he do toward exhibiting the unity
and variety of experience? (This is, of course, to be distin-
guished from the question sometimes asked, Is there any unity
in experience? If there is to be any immediate datum of con-
sciousness the unity is unquestionably as immediate as the
variety.) In a word, the question is not, Is the world one or
many? But, How is the world one and many? This question
is as old as the history of philosophy and has been uniformly
looked upon as a question of a fundamental kind. “If I find
any man,” says Socrates, “who is able to see unity and plurality
in nature, him I follow and walk in his steps as if he were a God”
(Phaedrus, 266.) The purpose of the following discussion,
therefore, is to set forth Green's metaphysic of the one and the
many, as given in his treatment of the individual, introducing
only as much illustrative material and application as is neces-
sary to hold fast the central idea.
The individual may be defined at once as the concrete em-
-bodiment of particularity and universality, that is to say, the
individual is both one and many. We shall follow Green's
attempt to explain the category of individuality and to apply it
successively to the object, the subject, and finally, to the uni-
verse as a whole, conceived as a subject-object complex. As a
basis for such a study it seemed wise to begin with an examination
of the problem and method of Green's metaphysics in order to
dispel a misunderstanding regarding his position on these points
which has, I think, stood in the way of a correct interpretation
of his entire system of philosophy.
I am grateful to Professor J. E. Creighton and to other mem-
PREFA CE. V
bers of the faculty of the Sage School of Philosophy for criticism
and guidance in the preparation of this monograph, and to my
wife for valuable assistance in verifying references and reading
proof.
NorthAMPTON, MASS.,
August 3, IgE4.
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
PAGE
PREFACE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iii
CHAPTER I. The Problem and Method of Green's Meta-
physics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I
Charter II. The Individuality of the object........... 18.
CHAPTER III. The Implications of Objectivity. . . . . . . . . . 35
CHAPTER IV. The Individuality of the Subject. . . . . . . . . . 46
CHAPTER V. God: The Complete Individual. . . . . . . . . . . . 67
INDEX. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9I
vii
THE PRINCIPLE OF INDIVIDUALITY IN THE
PHILOSOPHY OF THOMAS HILL GREEN
CHAPTER I.
THE PROBLEM AND METHOD OF GREEN'S METAPHYSICS.
“ABOUT Locke, as about every other philosopher, the essen-
tial questions are, What was his problem, and what was his
method?” Thus, at the beginning of his introduction to
Hume, Green expressed his idea of the true way to study a
system of philosophy. Three years later he wrote: “When
we understand what the questions exactly were that a philosopher
put to himself, and how he came to put them as he did, we are
more than half-way towards understanding the answer.” In
undertaking a serious examination of a fundamental conception
of Green's philosophy we can do no better than to follow the
spirit expressed in the above words, for if these statements are
true regarding any philosophy they are peculiarly true of Green's.
He was a pioneer in England of the form of thought commonly
known as German Idealism. He broke away from the common- º...se"
sense method of English Empiricism and substituted for it
a logical criticism almost if not quite as subtle and as unusual
as that of Hegel himself. His thought was a reaction against
the dominant empiricism of his day and especially against the 2
loose and hasty application of biological theory to metaphysical
and ethical questions. Although his treatment of evolution
shows that he grasped the real significance as well as the limita-
* Works of Thomas Hill Green, edited by R. L. Nettleship. Longmans, Green,
and Co., 1885. Vol. I, p. 5. (Hereafter referred to merely by volume and page.)
The essay in which the quotation occurs was first published in 1874 as an intro-
duction to Hume's Treatise of Human Nature in an edition of Hume's Works
edited by T. H. Green and T. H. Grose.
* III, 134.
2 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
tions of Darwin's results, we must remember that he wrote in
reply to evolutionary theory without the help of the great body
of literature to which the modern writer can appeal." The
theory, moreover, was then in its crudest form and not so free
from careless generalizations as it is today. Green's language
(seems to be at times unsympathetic or even hostile toward the
evolutionary method and results partly because we forget the
distinction between early and more recent forms of evolutionary
theory; but largely because the reader does not understand what
the questions exactly were that Green “put to himself and how
he came to put them as he did.” It is, therefore, fitting to
begin with an examination of his problem and his method.”
The form as well as the content of Green's question resembles
that of Kant, ‘How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?'
Green declares that the primary question of metaphysics is,
‘How is knowledge possible?' In explanation he adds: “It is not
to be confused with a question upon which metaphysicians are
sometimes supposed to waste their time—‘Is knowledge possible?'
. . . Metaphysic is no such superfluous labor. . . . It is simply
L ‘the consideration of what is implied in the fact of our knowing or
coming to know a world, or, conversely, in the fact of there being a
world for us to know.” He believes, moreover, that this is the
universal problem of metaphysics, common not only to the
German Idealists, but to Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. He com-
plains that the English philosophers of his day, unlike Kant, had
been unable to read the “movement of speculation, which issued
in Hume's Treatise” with an understanding mind; so that,
instead of “putting the metaphysical problem in its true and
distinctive form,” they had lost it outright and were even con-
gratulating themselves on being “wise enough to drop meta-
physics betimes and occupy themselves with psychology.”
1 He recognized in evolutionary theory a “valuable formulation of our knowledge
of animal life,” but he also saw clearly that it was not fitted for “the explanation of
knowledge.” I, 385.
* Cf. Edward Caird, “Idealism and the Theory of Knowledge,” Queen's Quarterly,
XII, IoS.
* I, 374. Italics mine.
* I, 375.
* Ibid. What he understood by psychology and why he rejected the psycho-
logical method will appear as we proceed.
PROBLEM AND METHOD OF GREEN'S METAPHYSICS. 3
In an age which was flooded with ‘scientific facts' from all
sides and in which the sciences seemed to be vying with each
other in gathering data, Green did not hope to discover any new
fact. Science was everywhere asking, ‘What are the facts?’;
he was asking, ‘What is a fact?" For the rational statement of
his problem it was by no means necessary that the deliverances
of physics, or biology, or psychology should be true, but merely
that they should claim to be true. His interest, like Kant's, was
to discover the rational basis of science or knowledge; and toward
the understanding of this problem the specific results of any
particular science could contribute but little. The matter, of
&
first importance for Green was not to prove or disprove this º ~
that scientific law, but to show that scientific law is possible only
on certain assumptions regarding the nature of reality in general:
In keeping with this he seldom or never questions the results of
science as such." He was wise enough to accept its results as
infinitely better than any a priori guesswork of philosophers and
theologians.” Science, however, is totally distinct from phi-
losophy, in this: it “takes for granted just what metaphysic, as a
theory of knowledge, seeks to explain.” The question at issue
between metaphysic and a science should not be looked upon as
one “between two coördinate sciences, as if a theory of the
human body were claiming also to be a theory of the human soul,
and the theory of the soul were resisting the aggression. The
question is, whether the conceptions which all the departmental
sciences alike presuppose shall have an account given of them
or no.”4
In opposition to the tendencies of his own day to treat psy-
chology as a universal science which could answer all questions,
Green lays great emphasis on the distinction between meta-
physics and psychology. The problem of all critical philosop
is to search out the foundations of knowledge, whereas psy-
* To be sure he protested against advancing the results of science in answer t
metaphysical or ethical questions.
* Cf. I, 384 f.
* I, I64. Green always treats psychology as one of the sciences and consequently
refers to it along with others in the quotation. Cf. I, 373.
* I, I64.
4 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
chology deals with the facts of individual psychic experience.
Psychology can hardly be said to raise general questions of
validity and much less to answer them. The psychologist treats
mind as his field of investigation in much the same way as the
botanist deals with plants. Both seek facts which may be
observed and tabulated, without being in the least concerned to
know what the existence of facts implies regarding the nature of
the whole of reality." Green did not question the facts of
psychology (which he understood to be concerned with the
phenomena of the mental life) any more than he questioned the
facts of biology; for his was a further question concerning the
presuppositions of any science which deals with facts. He does
not, for instance, suppose that the teaching of “our best psycho-
logists” that the knowledge we possess “results from the pro-
duction of feeling in us by the external world” is false.” It is
especially noteworthy that he does not attempt to show that
knowledge has had a miraculous birth or to dispute its relation
to the animal organism and the physical order. The following
quotation will make clear his position on this point: “If the
alternative really lay between experience and ready-made unac-
countable intuition as sources of knowledge; if the point in dis-
pute were whether theories about nature should be tested merely
by logical consistency or experimentally verified—whether sub-
jective beliefs should be put in the place of objective facts, or
brought into correspondence with them—the experientialists
would be entitled to all the self-confidence which they show.
That the question does not so stand, they can scarcely be ex-
pected to admit till their opponents constrain them to it; and
in England hitherto, whether from want of penetration or under
the influence of a theological arrière pensée, their opponents have
virtually put the antithesis in the form which yields the experi-
* See Green's distinction between Kant's problem and that of psychology, I,
384. The literature on the meaning of Kant's problem is far too extensive and
well known to require citations here, but it may be worth while to refer to two
characteristic illustrations of it. Andrew Seth, “Philosophy as Criticism of
Categories,” found in the volume, Essays in Philosophical Criticism, edited by
Andrew Seth and R. B. Haldane (1883); Edw. Caird, The Critical Philosophy of
Kant, Vol. I, Chapter I.
* I, 376.
PROBLEM AND METHOD OF GREEN'S METAPHYSICS. 5
entialists such an easy triumph. Both sides are in fact beating
the air till they meet upon the question, What constitutes the
experience which it is agreed is to us the sole conveyance of
knowledge? What do we mean by a fact? In what lies the A_
objectivity of the objective world?”
In spite of the care which Green has taken to distinguish his
question from that of the sciences in general and from that of
the science of psychology in particular there has been a singular
confusion regarding the nature of his problem. The real ques-
tion, What are the implications of the possibility of knowledge?
is taken to mean, What are the psychological facts of my indi-
vidual consciousness?” As a consequence of this misappre-
hension of his problem some of Green's critics persist in an
attempt to convict him of wrong conclusions regarding the latter
question, although we have no evidence that he undertook or
cared to answer it. It is quite surprising to find a recent writer
begin his criticism by classing Green as one of the “modern
psychologists.” Nor is this mistake confined, as might be
supposed, to those who reject Green's general conclusions. Mr.
W. H. Fairbrother, a sympathetic and enthusiastic interpreter of
Green's philosophy, has fallen into the same strange misrepre-
sentation of its problem and method. He declares that the
“two primary questions” of Green's metaphysics are, “What
are the facts of my own individual consciousness?” and, “What
is the simplest explanation I can give of the origin of these facts?”
It would be difficult to formulate two questions less repre-
sentative of the spirit and purpose of Green, since he is neither
directly interested in the facts of his own individual conscious-
ness nor-in the origin of those facts. 2 \
“The basis of practice,” writes one of Green's critics, “can -
- hardly be disclosed by a study of cognition. Still less can this
be looked for when knowledge is interpreted with neglect of its
* I, 385.
* Considering the number of times that this distinction of questions has been
made since the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason it ought to be uncalled
for now in a discussion of critical idealism. That it is not uncalled for cannot
better be illustrated than by these criticisms of Green.
* G. S. Fullerton, Psychological Review, Vol. IV, p. 8.
* The Philosophy of Thomas Hill Green (1896), p. 14.
~...~~
6 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
dynamic and purposive implications.” Would the author of the
Prolegomena to Ethics recognize his metaphysics when described
as “a study of cognition?” This phrase taken by itself, would
suggest that Green is supposed to be trying to found ethics on a
psychological introspection of his own mind rather than upon a
critical examination of the logical implications of knowledge.
But the last sentence of the quotation quite clearly indicates
the fundamental misinterpretation of Green's question upon
which Mr. Sturt's criticism proceeds. In this, as in the general
context, the critic seems tacitly to identify a study of cognition
with an analysis of knowledge. And this becomes still more
apparent when we read: “The idols that beset Green's philosophy
º V are, . . . Intellectualism and Subjectivism.” Now the charge
of intellectualism, although it is not directly concerned in the
present discussion, is particularly inappropriate to Green's
philosophy. A careful examination of the Prolegomena to Ethics
will show that no writer in modern times has had a firmer grasp
of the “dynamic and purposive implications of knowledge”
than has Green. The charge of subjectivism, however, more
clearly illustrates the almost total misapprehension of Green's
problem and method. Mr. Sturt seems to believe that Green
was trying to spin the world out of his own abstract subjective
experience; but Green has actually forestalled this charge by his
clear distinction between the psychological subject, with which
he is not directly concerned, and the subject of knowledge, with
which he is concerned. “It is important not to confuse the
- J/relation of subject and object,” he writes, “with the relation of
matter to the psychical organism. It is a common delusion that
one sort of phaenomena are ‘subjective,’ another “objective.’
In truth, ‘mental phaenomena' are just as objective as any,
phaenomena of matter just as subjective as any. If mind and
matter = two orders of phaenomena, they do not = subject and
object, for subject and object are correlative factors of everything
as known.” Here as elsewhere he insists that he is not con-
cerned with the individual processes of knowing, but with “what
1 Henry Sturt, Idoli Theatri (1906), p. 227.
*Ibid., p. 211.
* II, I81 (note). Cf. I, 387.
PROBLEM A ND METHOD OF GREEN'S METAPHYSICS. 7
is implied in the fact of our knowing,” or in the “fact of there
being a world for us to know.” Not only did he protest em-
phatically against substituting subjective whims and fancies for
objective facts, as will later appear in the discussion of conscious-
ness, but he approached the whole problem of philosophy with a
particularly strong aversion for a subjective method. Sub-
jectivism, in whatever form it appeared, brought forth his
determined opposition, but it was the subjectivism of the tradi-
tional method of English philosophy upon which his attack was
most persistent and effective.
Other writers who do not explicitly label Green as a psycholo-
gist, nevertheless, treat him as such." The radical distinction
which he makes between the problem of metaphysics and that
of psychology seems to be forgotten. If the distinction is un-
warranted the critic should devote himself to the task of showing
that there are no intelligible questions beyond those which psy-
chology raises; if it is warranted it should be maintained. The
distinction in question may or may not be permanently valid.
It is at least permanently significant in an account of Green's
philosophy. The psychology of his day claimed to be one of the
natural sciences and to have adopted the problems and methods
of natural science. Green was willing that psychology should
be accepted at its own estimate and persistently treated it in that
light. As one of the natural sciences he believed that it could
properly raise and answer questions of analysis, origin, or other
relation. The question which Green raised, on the other hand,
is consistently called metaphysical and is sharply and em-
phatically differentiated from scientific problems in general and
from psychological problems in particular. Effective criticism
of Green's philosophy must be metaphysical and must at least
discuss his statement of the problem of metaphysics. Since the
only problem he tries to answer is a metaphysical one it is mani-
festly unfair and unconvincing to treat him explicitly or im-
plicitly as a psychologist.
1. Cf. G. F. Stout's attempt to refute a phase of Green's metaphysics by intro-
spective analysis, in Mind, N. S. IX, p. 1 ff.; A. J. Balfour, Mind, IX, 86 f.;
A. E. Taylor, The Problem of Conduct, p. 71 ff. The content of these objections is
not necessarily introduced here. I merely refer to them as fair examples of at-
tempts to criticize Green from the psychological viewpoint.
8 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
Green fully believed that the problem he had chosen was
one common to all modern philosophy. In particular, he had
satisfied himself that English empiricism had been groping after
a statement of the same problem; but he was equally certain that
his method differed completely from that of his fellow country-
men. The method which he attributed to them was the psycho-
logical, by which he meant essentially what psychologists mean
today by introspection. That the workings of the mind could
be made an object of knowledge Green did not question. Psy-
chology, he writes, has “a region where it is truly independent of
metaphysical questions, . . . but this region . . . has definite
limits.” On the other hand, the question confronting the meta-
physician, and which the psychologists cannot evade, “concerns
the object of knowledge, and must be answered before the subjec-
tive process can be investigated.” The question, “What are the
conditions implied in the existence of such an object?” demands
an answer as a “necessary prolegomenon to all valid psychology.”
In the Introduction to Hume's Treatise of Human Nature the
author takes great pains to point out the fallacy involved in
attempting to solve a metaphysical problem by looking within
one’s ‘own breast.” Locke's plan of looking within his own
mind to see “how it wrought,” however valuable for certain
purposes, is quite inadequate as a method of metaphysics."
Indeed, the whole of the Introduction might be looked upon as an
attempt to show that Hume's scepticism was the necessary
outcome of adopting this method of ‘looking within.” The
weakness inherent in British empiricism was due, according to
Green, not to the fact that it had asked the wrong questions,
but that it had taken a hopeless method of answering them.
There is, indeed, no contention more often advanced throughout
his writings than that it is absolutely futile to try to answer an
ultimate metaphysical question by appeal to particular facts.
This general proposition applies as well in the case of psychical
* I, 375.
* I, 377. Marginal note.
* I, 377. Cf. II, 21.
* Cf. I, I 70; I, I2 I; I, 375.
5 I, 6.
PROBLEM AND METHOD OF GREEN'S METAPHYSICS. 9
facts as in the case of physical facts. No enumeration of the
subjective facts of consciousness can explain the consciousness' …
of facts, any more than an enumeration of objective facts ca | '…”
explain or unify the world. It is no answer to the question, How
is experience of facts possible? to point out the facts of experi-
ence. We inquire into the implications of the existence of fact,
and are presented with an alphabetical catalogue of facts. We
ask for bread and receive a stone. i
The method which Green proposed to use was critical rather
than empirical. That is, it was essentially the method of Kant;-
although Green objected to the use of the term ‘transcendental," |
probably because of the danger of being misunderstood. Kant's
use of the term had justly laid him open to severe criticism.
There is something in this terminology which smacks of the
“extra-experiential,' and it was precisely this error which Green
was seeking to avoid. His object was to discover an immanent
principle of organization within experience, not a world of
‘things by themselves' beyond it. Kant sought the a priori
conditions of experience; Green the logical implications of experi-
ence. The difference in terminology, however, should not blind
us to the similarity of the two methods. Both philosophers are
really interested in getting beyond the mere imſ ediacy of a
given experience to what Kant would call a “syſthetic judg-
ment." How shall we have any significant judgment: unless we
can, in some sense, get beyond a mere “given’? This question
came to both Kant and Green with great force; but on the other
hand, it is now safe to say that neither Kant nor Green was
really hunting for that chimera—a super-experiential reality.”
Green was well aware that Kant's world of ‘things by them-
selves' was an impossible and absurd abstraction, but he believed
that such a world was not the necessary result of the Kantian
method. The world of bare things was a mere aberration due
to the formal way in which Kant conceived the mind, not the
i H. Sidgwick, Mind, N. S., X, 18 f.
* Unless we understand experience in its narrowest psychological significance.
Cf. “Mr. Lewes' Account of Experience,” Green's Works, I, 442 f. The “only
valid idealism" is defined in this essay as “that idealism which trusts, not to a guess
about what is beyond experience, but to analysis of what is within it.” Ibid., 449.
Q &
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IO INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
essential outcome of the critical method. Indeed, so far is this
from being the true outcome, that it is to the critical method alone
that we must look for the correction of the fallacy involved.
Kant, as Green thought, had discovered the only possible basis
from which the real futility of a search for a world beyond
possible experience could be shown. Green, therefore, accepted
Kant's attempt to analyze experience or knowledge as a final
statement of the method of philosophy; but it was this very
method which led him to abandon ‘things-in-themselves,'
together with Kant's formal schema of the categories and
faculties. Before we can proceed to Green's analysis, however,
we must seek an answer to the question, What did he mean by
--~~ the experience which he proposes to examine?
It is doubtful whether any philosopher ever imagined himself
to be dealing with anything else but experience, yet the word is
- subject to most extravagant and ambiguous use. The issue
became especially clouded when the British philosophers took
the word as a shiboleth of true philosophy and as mark of dis-
tinction from continental thought, which was falsely supposed
to be dealine with some other world. But as Green says, “It is
not those, know, who cry Lord, Lord! the loudest, that
enter into kingdom of heaven, nor does the strongest asser-
tion of outfiependence on experience imply a true insight into
its nature. ! * Any experience which is to yield knowledge “must
not be me.' y an experience in the sense in which, for instance,
a plant nright be said to experience a succession of atmospheric
or chemical changes, or in which we ourselves pass through a
definite physical experience during sleep or in respect of the
numberless events which affect us but of which we are not aware.
J. Such an experience may no doubt gradually alter to any extent
{ the mode in which the physical organism reacts upon the stimulus.
It may be the condition of its becoming organic to intellectual
processes, but between it and experience of the kind which is to
yield a knowledge of nature there is a chasm which no one,
except by confusion of speech, has attempted to fill. Or to
speak more precisely, between the two senses of experience there
1. Cf. R. B. C. Johnson, Princeton Studies, Vol. I, No. 3, p. Io.
* I, 29I.



PROBLEM AND METHOD OF GREEN'S METAPHYSICS. II
is all the difference that exists between change and consciousness -
of change. Experience of the latter kind must be experience of
matters of fact recognized as such. . . . For this reason an
intelligent experience, or experience as the source of knowledge,
can neither be constituted by events of which it is the experience,
nor be a product of them.” Passages of this kind, which are
not uncommon in Green's writings, help to throw light on the
question, How is experience possible?. He means significant
experience, that is, “matters of fact recognized as such.” The
experience, therefore, of which Green is seeking a rational
account, is conscious or intelligent experience; but conscious
experience is experience of an object by a subject. Such an
experience, not constituted by feelings (psychical events) but by
judgments,” and therefore, necessarily involving subject and
object, is the kind of experience in which “the object has no real "
existence apart from the subject any more than the subject apart
from the object.”
While this definition of experience in terms of the subject-
object complex does not distinguish Green from other idealistic
philosophers, his method of analyzing the complex is more
peculiarly his own. Although he believes that a careful examina-
tion of either one of these two distinguishable but inseparable
factors within experience would necessarily involve and reveal
the nature of the other, he prefers to begin by a study of the
object. “A theory of consciousness, to be worth anything,” he
says, “must rest on an examination of objects.” This point is
of the utmost importance and is a distinguishing characteristic
of Green's idealism. In a suggestive review of John Caird's
Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, which Green wrote a
little less than two years before his death, he states his objection
to Hegelianism in unambiguous language. Admitting that
Hegel's conclusion is “the last word of philosophy,” he still
feels much dissatisfied with the method which Hegel used in
* Prolegomena to Ethics, sections 15, 16.
* Cf. I, 448.
* I, 522. Cf. I, I4I.
* I, 483. Cf. I, 377; II, 2I.
* III, I4I.
I2 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
obtaining it. He has an “uneasy sense that it is little likely to
carry conviction.” “When we think out the problem left by
previous inquirers,” he continues, “we find ourselves led to it
[i. e., Hegel's doctrine] by an intellectual necessity; but on
reflection we become aware that we are Hegelian, so to speak,
with only a fraction of our thoughts—on the Sundays of specu-
lation, not on the weekdays of ordinary thought.” He con-
cludes that Hegel's results need to be “put in a form which
will command some general acceptance,” for “we suspect that
all along Hegel's method has stood in the way of an acceptance
º of his conclusion, because he, at any rate, seemed to arrive at his
conclusion as to the spirituality of the world, not by interrogating
the world, but by interrogating his own thoughts.”
Green constantly shows throughout his writing that he prefers
to begin in an objective fashion with an examination of the object
of knowledge. Even in the Prolegomena to Ethics, where he
would be most expected to interrogate the subject rather than
the world, nearly half of the first book is given up to a discussion
of the ‘Spiritual Principle in Nature,” which is essentially an
examination of the objective phase of experience. We must not
be misled by the phrase ‘Spiritual Principle’ into supposing that
Green is treating nature as even quasi-subjective.” Nature
means for him the world of phenomena, that is, the objective
aspect of experience; and the spiritual principle refers merely
to the necessary interrelation and organization of the objective
world, through which each thing is limited and constituted by
all others—through which the objective world is a cosmos
Nevertheless, this characteristic bias of Green's method is easily
overlooked if we confine our study solely or largely to the ethics.
For, inasmuch as ethics deals with persons, it is quite natural
that the emphasis should there be given to the subjective aspect
ºf of experience. Moreover, Green did not pretend to stop with
an interrogation of the objective world, but only to begin with it.
In order to understand the full value of his choice of method
1 Ibid.
* III, I.46. Italics mine.
* For Green the opposite of ‘natural' is not ‘supernatural,' but ‘spiritual’;
‘supernatural’ being a “mere phrase to which no reality corresponds.” III, 265.
PROBLEM AND METHOD OF GREEN'S METAPHYSICS. I3
it is, therefore, advisable to turn from the ethics, which was the
culmination of his thought, to his earlier and more strictly
logical writings. * .
He who would grasp the full significance of Green's examination
of the object must first of all totally abandon the Kantian
“thing-in-itself,’ and accept the obvious implications which such
an abandonment carries with it. Foremost among these impli-
cations is the doctrine that, since reality is composed of possible
objects of experience, a true account of experience will also be a
true account of reality. Or, to put the matter in less ambiguous
terms, Green would say that true knowledge is knowledge of
reality. As one writer puts it: “Knowledge-professes to be
knowledge of reality; and thus if we raise the question ‘How is
knowledge possible'? or even the sceptical question ‘Is know-
ledge possible at all?' we are ipso facto dealing with the questiºn)
‘What is reality—the only reality we can know or intelligently
talk about?’” We find this thesis in the writing of Green
repeated in one way or another with tiresome iteration; but it
is only fair to remember that it was not so generally accepted
when Green wrote as it is now. The basis for such a conclusion
was definitely laid in the Critiqué of Pure Reason, but it did not
become explicit until the later idealists had disentangled the
positive from the negative results of Kant's work. Strictly
speaking it was not, perhaps, until Hegel that philosophy was
consciously ready to abandon ‘things-in-themselves’ and to look
for an answer to its question within rather than beyond experi-
ence. Green quotes Hume to the effect that “the double exist-
ence of perceptions and objects is a gratuitous fiction of phil-
osophers, of which vulgar thinking is entirely innocent,” and
remarks that Hume builded better than he knew; for although
the statement is inconsistent with Hume's own principles, it is a
true account of the intimate relation between thought and
reality.” He declares that contradictions “under whatever
disguise, must attach to every philosophy that admits a reality
either in things as apart from thought or in thought as apart
1 D. G. Ritchie, Philosophical Review, III, 17.
2 Cf. I, 261.
I4 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
A
Z
2.
.”
from things, and only disappear when the thing as thought of,
and through thought individualized by the relations which
constitute its community with the universe, is recognized as
alone the real.” Earlier in the same essay we read: “Of the
*
4. as outside consciousness nothing can be said; and of that
gain within consciousness, which is supposed to represent it,
nothing can be said.”
It is a common supposition that one or more qualities belong
to the object in its own right, but that the others are added by
the mind, and that when the latter are stripped off there still
º N remains the unknown existence of the thing. Green's criticism
of this view is clearly implied in his rejection of ‘things-in-
themselves' and in his thoroughgoing belief that all objects are
objects of knowledge. Even if one could be credulous enough to
accept the statement that things unknown are unrelated (on the
authority of a speaker who belies his own words by forming a
judgment about these hypothetical reals), one would still be
puzzled to know or even to imagine what truth the statement
could have or how it differed in the least from falsehood. Green
is inclined to treat this contention as the uncertain attempt of
careless thinking to state the ground for a distinction between
truth and falsehood, but put in such a way that it conveys no
meaning. But may we not at least suppose that there is such
an unknown, unrelated thing corresponding to our idea even
though we can know nothing about it? Probably Green would
admit that we may suppose anything we like, but, as he con-
tends on another occasion, that which is a mere possibility does
not exist.” Locke, for instance, treats the supposition that
there is a mere body to correspond to the given idea, not, to be
sure, as knowledge, but as “an assurance that deserves the
name of knowledge.” Upon this distinction of Locke's between
knowledge and assurance Green comments as follows: “To seek
escape from this dilemma by calling the consciousness of the
* I, I4I.
2 I, 71.
* III, 221 ff.
* Quoted by Green (I, 48) from Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding,
Book IV, Chapter II, Sec. I4, and XI, 3.
PROBLEM A ND METHOD OF GREEN'S METAPHYSICS. I5
agreement in question an assurance instead of knowledge is a
mere verbal subterfuge. There can be no assurance of agree-
ment between an idea and that which is no object of consciousness
at all. If, however, existence is an object of consciousness, it
can, according to Locke, be nothing but an idea, and the question
as to the assurance of agreement is no less unmeaning than the
question as to the knowledge of it. The raising of the question
in fact, as Locke puts it, implies the impossibility of answering it.
It cannot be raised with any significance, unless existence is
external to and other than an idea. It cannot be answered unless
existence is, or is given in, an object of consciousness, i. e., an
idea.” -
There is no place in Green's philosophy for speculations about
what may be possible in some land of day dreams. The business
of philosophy does not permit holiday excursions into the region
of myth. The only objects with which speculation can deal are
knowable objects, i. e., objects vitally connected with subjects.
This is sure to suggest that all of Green's profession to deal first
with the object was but a pretext to conceal his underlying
subjectivism; for no sooner does he mention the object than he
becomes involved in a discussion of thought. Does he not
straightway give up his contention that a true theory of con-
sciousness must be founded on an examination of the object by
thus declaring that consciousness and its object can never be
separated? This criticism may appear plausible at first sight;
but upon closer scrutiny it turns out to be unjustified, since
Green's assumption is one that lies at the root of all criticism.
He simply articulates the presupposition of all theories of ob-
jectivity, namely, that a proposal to deal with the object as a
thing abiding alone is a suicidal method. His declaration means
simply that the statements which he is about to make concerning
the object are serious, and at least not hopeless, attempts to get
at the real object, rather than empty guesses forever beyond
verification.
That all objects are objects of consciousness or knowledge is
not synonymous with the claim that we can know nothing beyond
* I, 49.
I6 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
our states of consciousness, or, as Locke would say, that knowledge
is concerned with ‘the agreement and disagreement of our ideas.”
Indeed, it is the very refutation of such a doctrine; for as Green
puts it, “It is quite a tenable position to deny that an object
is a state of consciousness, and yet to hold that only for a thinking
consciousness has it any reality.” It would be just as true and
just as false to maintain that we can know nothing which is not
beyond our states of consciousness. Both of these extreme state-
ments are false because each implies a fundamental separation
between consciousness and its object. The truth is more nearly
approached when we give up all such antitheses and cease to
talk of the object as it is known as even implicitly opposed to
the object as it is not known. We should content ourselves with
a discussion of the object of knowledge—the only object there is.
Indeed, the expression “object of knowledge' is, for Green, re-
dundant except in so far as it serves to exhibit the fallacy of the
“thing-in-itself.” -
The conclusion thus far reached is that Green's philosophy is
best understood when looked upon as a reaction against the classic
British school of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. He objected to
breaking experience up into atomic parts and dealing with those
parts as independent reals. Such an abstract procedure resulted,
he believed, in Hume's denial of the possibility of knowledge.
It was this situation which led Kant to inquire “How is experi-
ence possible?”, and it was this situation modified by the results
of Kant's work which was the point of departure for Green's
speculation. The problem which Green undertook to solve
closely resembles that of Kant; indeed, in form and substance
the metaphysical questions of the two philosophers are identical.”
* An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Bk. IV, Ch. I, Sec. 2.
* I, 423. Cf. I, I41; II, 73, 212 ff. Contrast with this statement of Green's
that of Alfred Barratt, one of his older contemporaries at Oxford: “Thus we have
seen from every point of view that all that we can know is ourselves, and that
every hypothesis that we can frame is nothing but an extension of ourselves.
Hence on the one hand, we perceive the futility of Metaphysics or Ontology, which
is in truth nothing but an Agnoiology, a Non-Science of Ignorance.” Physical
Ethics (1869), p. 360. In this connection notice may also be taken of Bradley's
statement that to be real is to be indissolubly one thing with sentience. Appear-
ance and Reality (1893), p. 146.
* Cf. D. G. Ritchie, Contemporary Review, LI, p. 843; also Mark Pattison,
Memoir, p. 167. -
PROBLEM AND METHOD OF GREEN'S METAPHYSICS. I?
There is, however, a considerable difference in their respective
methods and results. The lapse of time between the publication
of the Critique of Pure Reason and the middle of the nineteenth
century had served to modify the formalism of Kant's critical
procedure so that it had become at once more critical and more
plastic. The non-essential parts of Kant's method, such as the
separation of the phenomenal from the noumenal, the form from
the matter of experience, and the rigid table of categories had
been purged away. The essential method of searching out the
principles of organization within experience remained, however,
and was epitomized in the persistent question “How is experience
possible?” Such a question, according to Green, does not
involve a discussion as to whether or not experience is possible, |
nor yet a psychological account of the origin of experience by
means of sensation or otherwise. By experience Green means
“matters of fact recognized as such,” and by an examination of
such an experience he hoped to discover the constitution of
reality through which experience is possible. In his examination
he chose to begin in a purely objective fashion with a study of the
object. He objected to beginning, as he believed Hegel had
begun, with an examination of his own thought; but would in-
stead inquire into the nature of thought's object. It is to be
remembered, however, that he distinctly proposes to deal with
thought's object; not with an hypothetical object, as it might be
carelessly supposed to exist, independent of thought. When
Green abandoned the Kantian ‘thing-in-itself’ he gave up, once
and for all time, the hope of getting outside of experience to a
realm of independent reals untouched by thought. Such a posi-
tion is not, however, synonymous with the contention that we
can know nothing beyond our states of consciousness; for states
of consciousness themselves are objects of knowledge. The rela-
tion of objects to psychic states and the relation of objects to
knowledge are fundamentally different. All objects whatever
are objects of knowledge.
~

CHAPTER II.
THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE OBJECT.
WHETHER Green is discussing logic, ethics, politics, education,
or religion one idea controls his thought. This idea is that our
philosophical and social theory must be founded upon a broad
and adequate notion of the individual. Green's life work may
be properly characterized as an emphatic and sustained protest
against the abstract particular, and an attempt to substitute for
the particular the true notion of the individual. He probably
did more than any one else in England to point out, what is now
generally recognized, that the besetting sin of British phi-
/ losophy was its tendency to treat experience as a sum of atomic
parts. The often quoted remark that Hume failed to see the
forest for the trees has fixed this criticism in the minds of many
who do not know that it was Green who first had the patience to
work it out in detail. Yet it was largely through his efforts in
defining the nature of the individual that British speculation was
saved from being lost in the abyss of Hume's scepticism.
Green particularly objected to the fallacy of the abstract
particular as it was expressed in the logic and metaphysics of
his generation. The theories of knowledge which had been
developed in England had resulted, as Green believed, in a general
denial of the possibility of knowledge. The reason for this out-
come was to be sought in the philosophy of Locke, whose original
assumptions Hume had but developed to their necessary con-
clusion. If we start with unconnected “bits of knowledge stuff'
we shall never get beyond them, for no true account of knowledge
can be given on the supposition that it originates in that which
is not knowledge. Whatever metaphysics had survived the
failure of a theory of knowledge had survived, as might be ex-
pected, in a common-sense revolt against scepticism. At least
the majority of those who rejected Hume were satisfied to base
their objections on uncriticized metaphysical assumptions, the
I8
THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE OBJECT. I9
very assumptions, in fact, from which scepticism had resulted.
While they revolted at Hume's conclusions they were unwilling
to abandon Hume's premises as found in Locke. Nor could any
other result be hoped for until the movement from Locke to
Hume should be reviewed by a critic with sufficient insight to
detect and emphasize the fallacy of the abstract particular which
formed the leading presupposition of that movement. The
Kantian philosophy, to be sure, had offered the required criti-
cism, but in such a form that England had, up to that time,
received but little enlightenment from it. In addition to the
foreign sound of the critical philosophy, its implicit criticism of
Hume needed to be explicated before it could be of wide influence.
However much a follower of Kant or Hegel Green may have
been, it is quite certain that he was more able than either Kant
or Hegel to interpret the success and failure of the English
philosophy to the English people. He was firmly convinced that
there was but one way to escape the tangle of scepticism and ,
ſ
that that way consisted in recognizing the true nature of the
individual, as an organic union of the universal and the particular;
or, in terms of Hegel's philosophy, as the concrete universal.
Therefore, Green's philosophy may properly be said to begin |
and end with a discussion of the nature of the individual."
Although Green's treatment of the individual person is gen-
erally regarded as the distinguishing mark of his philosophy,
it is the culmination rather than the beginning of his thought.
His conception of the human individual is founded on an ex-
haustive and labored criticism of the individual, as such. The
charge, so often made, that Green reaches his conclusions about
man and God per saltum carries greatest conviction to those who
have neglected the more subtle passages in his works for the
more readable. In the present chapter an attempt will be made
to set forth his treatment of the individual as an object and thus
to lay bare the logical foundation upon which rests his later, and
perhaps more attractive treatment of personality.
1 This may account for the fact that Green gave no systematic treatment of
the categories. He has been blamed for neglecting this (cf. A. Eastwood, Mind,
XVI, 243 ff.; H. Haldar, Philosophical Review, III, 172 ff.; R. B. C. Johnson,
Princeton Studies, I, 3, 18); but what category is there which is not involved in a
discussion of the individual?
f
*
...~"
2O INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
Probably everyone will admit on reflection that each object
as we know it is related to other objects. And the more we study
the object the more complicated and far-reaching do its relations
become. Objects are related most obviously to each other in
space and time, but there are also relations of origin and decay
and the still more subtle relations of function or reciprocity.
Each object is not only connected with other objects, but it is
ultimately connected in some sense with all other objects in the
varied process of the universe. So much is a commonplace of
philosophy, though chiefly commonplace because it is not carried
out to its full logical significance, but is taken simply to mean
that reality is composed of a great number of particulars, in their
own nature unrelated, though connected with each other in an
external fashion as sticks might be bound together with a cord.
This idea of a mechanical relation is definitely opposed by
Green since it seems to assume that things are there before they
are related. In criticizing this conception of external relations
he proposes to show that the unrelated does not exist in any
sense whatever. Moreover, the latter statement must be taken
as a simple, unmetaphorical truth. It admits of no qualification
which would tend to destroy its radical character. Green's
treatment of objectivity does not deserve attention because it is
based upon the common observation that objects are related to
each other, but because it results in the conclusion that the rela-
tions are internal to the object, that is to say, that the relations
constitute the object.
Before proceeding to Green's exposition of this radical thesis,
however, it is necessary to dispose of the general objection
that things must be there to relate before they can be related.”
The implication is that Green's language reveals a subtle self-
contradiction, that all his talk of relations would carry no
weight unless he surreptitiously introduced the conception of
something beside the relations, namely, that which is related.
The objection seems based on a misunderstanding of the force of
Green's argument, since it assumes that existence is not a rela-
tion; which is the very point at issue. In the words of William
1. Cf. A. J. Balfour, Mind, IX, 8o f.
THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE OBJECT. 2I
Wallace: “The refuter does not take unrelated in all its bitter
truth, its absoluteness and utterness: he still leaves it in its com-
parative sense, indicating the absence of those relations without
which the being may still exist and perform its function.”
In the case of any given relation there is no doubt that we do
refer to end terms, more or less properly known as the things
which are related; but Green's contention is significant just at
this point, for the things which are related, when further ex-
amined, turn out to be themselves made up of relations.
The “Introduction to Hume's Treatise of Human Nature” is
essentially a protest against an account of experience in quasi-y
physical or mechanical terms. Here Green enters into an’
exhaustive criticism of the foundations of British idealism,
exposing with untiring zeal the inconsistencies of Locke's method,”
which had, as he believed, led to the objectionable results of
Hume. Eight years earlier, however, in his essay on “The
Philosophy of Aristotle,” printed in the North British Review,
Green had already clearly defined his protest against the abstract
particular. In this essay the author is at his best both in style
and subject matter, and the essay clearly reveals the influence
which the study of Greek thought had upon his philosophy.”
He found Greek thinking kindred to his own and believed that he
saw ample support in it for his own objection to the abstract ºf
universal as well as to the abstract particular.
His contention that the unrelated does not exist is practically
identical with the notion, which played so great a part in Greek
philosophy, that the indeterminate is the same as non-being.
This is a view, says Green, “which first finds distinct utterance
in the dictum of Heraclitus, that objects of sense, as such, can-
not be known. The sensible is the indeterminate (ré àretpoi),
and the becoming (tò yaºyvöuevov). The “object of sense” aS
the indeterminate non-being is contrasted with the “object of
knowledge,” the determinate and related.
Green constantly reveals his own view in expounding that of
Aristotle. Adopting the above contrast between the “object of
* 72
1 Lectures and Essays on Natural Theology &nd Ethics (1898), p. 562.
* III, 53.
º
f
{
l
º,
22 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
sense” and the “object of knowledge,” he agrees with the Greek
notion that the object of sense can “only be described as that
which is incapable of description, only determined as the inde-
terminate, or, to take a figure from the sphere of art, it is a
matter as yet without form; not, however, such a matter as the
artist uses, already formed by the eternal Demiurge, but the
negation of all form. In other words, it is nothing, for to be
anything it must have a form of some kind.” On the other
hand, the “object of knowledge” is capable of some sort of
definition, it is, in fact, that which is related. “That which is
known,” he says, “must be susceptible of definition and descrip-
tion. If I say that I have knowledge of this bed as an object of
sense, and try to describe it, it appears that I do this by its
properties. These, however, are not properly sensible but
intelligible. . . . The attempt to know the sensible at once
transmutes it into the intelligible.”
In as much as Green is irrevocably committed to a treatment
of the object of knowledge, or, to use his own suggestive phrase,
of “matters of fact recognized as such,” his interest in what he
here designates the object of sense must be looked upon as a
means to an end. The object of sense in being absolutely unde-
termined does not really exist. When we attempt to think away
the properties or relations of the object of knowledge we find
that just at the point where definition becomes impossible, the
object, properly speaking, ceases to exist—vanishes into the
limbus of indetermination, and thus becomes non-being. “If
we take as the germ of intelligent experience,” he writes, “the
simple consciousness of a sensation, this can only be expressed
as the judgment, ‘something is here.' The “here,' however, is
the next moment a “there'; the one sensation is superseded by
another.” Without distinctions the object is not possible.
The positive result, therefore, of Green's criticism of the “object
of sense’ is the conviction that the real object, the “object of
knowledge,' is the limited, the defined, and that if we suppose
* III, 54.
2 Ibid.
* Prolegomena, sec. 16.
4 III, 52.
THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE OBJECT. 23
all definition, i. e., all properties, absent, nothing remains. But
the properties are relations to other objects. The most abstract
object possible for us to deal with is at least a ‘this,' and is there-
fore distinguished from some other object—it is named. To put
the matter in Green's single sentence; “The object of knowledge
and the true reality coincide.” Objectivity is through and
through ideal or intelligible, i. e., it is made up of relations.
This conclusion, however, is to be carefully distinguished from
those theories which tend to reduce the objective world to ‘states
of consciousness,' or, as the saying is, to consider the object as
but a mere idea in the mind. In this matter Green agrees wholly .
with the words of Bosanquet: “The Sun' means ‘the Sun';
and whatever that may be, it is not anything merely in my mind;
not relative purely to me as a conscious organism; not a psychical
fact in my individual history.” He had not the slightest notion
of identifying himself with any idealism of the subjective type,
indeed, his theory is fundamentally opposed to such an idealism.
He objects first of all to the phrase “mere idea” because it is based
upon a false antithesis between the real and the work of the mind
—a distinction which gained currency through the ‘new way of
ideas' which from Locke onwards assumes that nothing is known
except the order and connection of ideas within the mind. The
very statement postulates a world of reality beyond our states
of consciousness but would destroy all hope of coming into
contact with it. Thomas Reid has well expressed the natural
objection to this theory which limits our knowledge to the order
and connection of our ideas, in the following language: “If
this be true; supposing certain impressions and ideas to exist
presently in my mind, I cannot, from their existence, infer the
existence of any thing else; my impressions and ideas are the
only existences of which I can have any knowledge or concep-
tion; and they are such fleeting and transitory beings, that they
can have no existence at all, any longer than I am conscious of
them. So that, upon this hypothesis, the whole universe about
me, bodies and spirits, sun, moon, stars, and earth, friends and
1 III, 54.
* Logic (second edition), I, 73.

24 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
relations, all things without exception, which I imagined to have
a permanent existence whether I thought of them or not, vanish
at Once;
And, like the baseless fabric of a vision,
Leave not a track behind."1
This protest voiced by Scottish philosophy was an open
expression of a general dissatisfaction with British idealistic
theory. Such a theory was well calculated to bring about a
stout resistance from those who were apprehensive lest solid,
objective facts should disappear into subjective whim. That
such a resistance, however blind at first, was a just one was
amply demonstrated in the course of the development from
Locke to Hume. Locke had, to be sure, awkwardly tried to re-
tain a grasp on the solid world by his famous distinction between
the primary and secondary qualities of objects; but little by little
the distinction had fallen of its own weight since it could not
possibly be harmonized with his own more fundamental theory
of knowledge. Berkeley with remorseless logic showed that the
A primary qualities could be reduced to the same terms with the
secondary; that extension, for instance, no more truly existed
within the object itself beyond our idea than does color or odor.
Berkeley's criticism was, however, unsatisfactory to the sober
thinking of England because it had apparently destroyed the
antithesis by transmuting the primary into the secondary quali-
ties. In doing so Berkeley had kept the Lockean distinction in
all its essentials; for in his hands all qualities became just what a
part of them were for Locke. Instead of rising above the ab-
straction to a conception of the concrete relation of thought and
its object, he had chosen the extreme which seemed to him
furthest removed from the “mathematical atheism,’ which he so
much desired to refute, and reduced the other extreme to it.
“With Locke,” says Green, “it was body or matter, as proxi-
mately, though in subordination to the Divine Will, the im-
printer of those most lively ideas which we cannot make for
ourselves. His followers insisted on the proximate, while they
ignored the ultimate, reference. Hence, as Berkeley conceived,
1 An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (third
edition, Dublin, 1779), pp. v.-vi; (Stewart edition, 1813), Vol. I, p. 168.
THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE OBJECT. 25
their Atheism, which he could cut from under their feet by the
simple plan of eliminating the proximate reference altogether,
and thus showing that God, not matter, is the immediate im-
printer of ideas on the senses and the suggester of such ideas of
imagination as the ideas of sense, in virtue of habitual associa-
tion, constantly introduce.” The result of such a method was
that matter became for Berkeley “a fiction” except in so far as
its qualities “can be reduced to simple feelings.” “But in the
hurry of theological advocacy,” Green continues, “and under
the influence of a misleading terminology, he failed to distinguish
this true proposition—there is nothing real apart from thought—
from this false one, its virtual contradictory—there is nothing
other than feeling.”
At this point Green is diametrically opposed to Berkeleyean
idealism as he understood it. The formula esse est percipi seemed
to him to be a declaration that there is nothing other than feeling,
i. e., nothing beyond conscious states, and this he tells us is the
virtual contradictory of his own tº ory that there is nothing
real apart from thought. From su ch language it is evident
then that Green had no intention of reducing the world of
objects to the fleeting shadows of ideas r psychic states by the
declaration that the unrelated, does not exist. The object is just
as real as thought, but neither is real apart from the other.
They are to be conceived “as together in essential correlation
constituting the real.” Indeed, far from making the object
unreal, its relation to thought is precisely that in which its reality
consists, since it, like everything else, is real in its connection
with other things and not by being somehow opposed to the
unreal.
The antithesis between the real and the work of the mind is
invalid, not necessarily because the real is the work of the
mind, but, as Green says, “because the work of the mind is
real.” “Either the work of the mind,” he says, “is a name for
* I, I39.
* I, I35.
* I, I40, I4I. Cf. II, 212 ft.
* I, I4I.
* Prolegomena, sec. 24.
26 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
nothing, expressing a mere privation or indeterminateness, a
mere absence of qualities—in which case nothing is conveyed by
the proposition which opposes the real or anything else to it:
or, on the other hand, if it has qualities and relations of its own,
then it is just as real as anything else.” But even if we were to
admit, for the sake of the argument, that the work of the mind is
unreal, it would then be clearly impossible to assign any meaning
to its opposite, a supposed real; for, in the words of Green,
“Whether we suppose it the quality of a mere sensation, as such,
or of mere body, as such, we find that we are unawares defining
it by relations which are themselves the work of the mind, and
that after abstraction of these nothing remains to give the anti-
thesis to the work of the mind any meaning.” If we try to
consider the mere sensation as the real we must admit that
such a “reality is in perpetual process of disappearing into the
unreality of thought. No point can be fixed either in the flux of
time or in the imaginary process from without to within the mind,
on the one side of which can be placed real existence, on the other
the mere idea.” - .
Green's definition of the real is well summed up in the above
phrase as that which “has qualities and relations of its own.”
This is but the positive form of the statement that the unrelated
does not exist. It is on this account that the question “What is
real?” seems to Green to be a “futile one,” for it can be answered
only by saying "everything is real,' since everything with which
we have to do “has qualities and relations of its own.” It is
therefore impossible to say ‘this’ is real, ‘that’ is unreal; for
all designation is relation, and all relation is the mark of reality.
The general question What is real? is, therefore, not complete.
Before it can be understood and answered it must be changed so
that it will have a content expressing a doubtful relation. I may
ask of myself or another whether a given relation which I have
assumed is really as I have assumed. Such a question can be
answered in turn only by reference to other relations. But the
* Prolegomena, sec. 22. My italics.
* I, 93.
* I, 70.
* Cf. Prolegomena, sec. 24.
THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE OBJECT. 27
question, in general, is as barren as any proposed by the School-
men; it simply conveys no meaning and would not be supposed
to do so were it not for the fact that the mind adds enough to the
bare statement to make it determinate. We unhesitatingly
interpret the question in its individual context and taking the
will for the words we answer it as best we can. By the general
question the speaker usually intends to inquire for a distinction
between objective fact and subjective fancy; but real and unreal
are not equivalent to fact and fancy. Every thoroughgoing
philosophy must attempt some distinction between the latter
pair, but to start with a distinction between the former is to
make philosophy impossible."
Green devotes a great deal of attention to the distinction
between fact and fancy. As we noted in Chapter I, he actually
considers the question “What is a fact?” a fundamental one for
metaphysic. ‘Fact' for Green is virtually synonymous with
“object,' and his treatment of the object cannot be considered
apart from his treatment of the nature of a fact. At first thought
it may seem fanciful to identify fact and object, but when we
remember that the object is the object of knowledge we get a
glimpse of the identity. The characteristic features of the object
and the characteristic arguments in Green's treatment of it
will be found also in a discussion of the ‘fact.' Like the object,
the fact never stands alone in bare abstraction, but is constituted
by its relations to other facts. Philosophy has to face the
problem of the unrelated particular here just as it did in the case
of objects. The common opinion seems to be that facts exist
somehow as unyielding static things, and that the mind collects
them and strings them together by attaching one to another in
an external fashion. Facts are variously spoken of as ‘immedi-
ate,’ as ‘given in sensation,' or, we are bidden to settle our dis-
putes by observing the facts just as we have been told to compare
our idea with its object in order to test the truth or adequacy of
the idea. Facts are supposed to be the ‘raw material’ of knowl-
edge, in their own peculiar nature quite without form or mean-
ing, in short, quite unideal. No sooner do we get rid of the
1 Cf. I, 268.
28 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
unrelated thing beyond knowledge than it appears again, this
time within knowledge, as the unmeaning fact or datum out of
which knowledge is supposed to arise. Green is more hostile,
if possible, to the latter contention than he was to the former.
“The unscientific man,” says Green, “if asked what an acid is,
will say, perhaps, that it is that which sets his teeth on edge,”
thus revealing an essentially correct apprehension of the fact
as a relation. If the ‘unscientific man' is pressed, however, he
will perhaps resort to the hypothesis that the facts are given and
the relations added by the mind. This position is not peculiar,
indeed, to the unscientific man. Much philosophical discussion
has been founded on just this supposed difference in kind between
fact and theory. That bare, crude facts exist prior to con-
nection and interpretation is, perhaps, a more subtle error than
that the thing is there before it is related; for here at least we
do not propose to describe that which, by hypothesis, we have
placed beyond the reach of description. Our datum is admittedly
a datum within experience, but it is looked upon simply as a
datum, a mere unmediated particular, an atom of knowledge.
This fallacy is harder to refute because it is more widely held by
all classes of people, and therefore more deeply entrenched in
language and custom. Even the most sophisticated science
speaks of collecting its data before it begins to interpret and of
getting the ‘facts before theories.’
“Every kind of fact,” says Bradley, “must possess these two
sides of existence and content, . . . But there is a class of facts
which possess another and additional third side. They have a
‘meaning.” Against such a view Green opposes the contention
that there are no facts without meaning. It is the very nature
of a fact to be in an intelligible relation, in the form of judgment,
'l III, 53.
* Principles of Logic (1883), p. 3. Italics mine. There is no doubt that passages
may be found in Bradley which are in general harmony with the views advanced
by Green; e. g., “there exists a notion that ideality is something outside of facts,
something imported into them, or imposed as a sort of layer above them; and we
talk as if facts, when let alone, were in no sense ideal. But any such notion is
illusory.” (Appearance and Reality, p. 165.) Even here, however, the context
leads the reader to conclude that the author is not firmly convinced of the truth of
his own statement.
THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE OBJECT. 29
and thus to have a meaning. “Mere sensation,” he writes,
“is in truth a phrase that represents no reality. It is the result
of a process of abstraction; but having got the phrase we give a
confused meaning to it, we fill up the shell which our abstraction
has left, by reintroducing the qualification which we assumed
ourselves to have got rid of. We present the mere sensations
to ourselves as determined by relation in a way that would be
impossible in the absence of that connecting action which we
assume to be absent in designating them mere sensations.”
If such a position is defensible it means that there can be no
antithesis between “thought, as that in which we are active, and
experience, as that in which we are simply receptive,” for
“thought appears as a factor in experience even in its remotest
germs.” It also follows that knowledge is not a process of con-
juring meaning out of crude facts or unmeaning data. Facts,
like sensations, are, for him, already judgments. In short, the
‘mere datum of the senses,’ the unpredicated particular, under
whatever disguise, has no claim upon philosophy. It is but the
result of inadequate thinking to suppose that facts exist prior to
interpretation.”
Another reason which Green gives for rejecting the notion
that facts are given as uninterpreted particulars is that such a
view leads to wrong conclusions regarding the nature of thought. ..
The ‘general idea’ comes to be regarded as the result of numerous
repetitions in Hume's sense. Through sensation we are Sup-
posed to get the concrete facts, the function of thought being to
supervene and strip off these attributes from the concrete, im-
mediate experience, in order to ‘recombine them’ in the form of
the universal which thus becomes a sort of ‘mutilated par-
ticular.” In his lectures on “The Logic of the Formal Logi-
cians,” delivered at Oxford in 1874–75, Green deals in a very
significant way with this conception of the universal as the
1 Prolegomena, sec. 46.
* III, 52.
* If there are animals which feel without thinking, their feelings are not facts
for them but only for another. Green does not need to prove that there are no
such animals but only that wherever there is knowledge there is something other
than physiological processes. Cf. Prolegomena, sec. 48, also I, I42, 281, 282.
* Cf. III, 48, 49.
3O INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
\
abstract remnant of once living particulars. “The process of
abstraction,” he says, “as ordinarily described (as beginning with
complex attributes and leaving out attributes till the notion is
reached which has the minimum of determination), if it really
took place, would consist in moving backwards. It would be a
donkey-race. The man who had gone least way in it would have
the advantage, in respect of fulness and definiteness of thinking,
of the man who had gone furthest.” He says elsewhere that
thinking “is not a progress from the less to the more abstract,
but from the less to the more determinate. . . . If it separates
one attribute from another, it is to make each not less but more
definite in virtue of a new relation.”
These false notions concerning the nature of thought have
been fostered and even promulgated by formal logic which, in
Green's language, “is the science not of the method of knowledge
(which implies relation to objects), but of those “forms of thought’
in conforming to which we think correctly, but in a way that
contributes nothing to knowledge or truth.” This conception
of logic appealed to the Schoolmen, for “they did not want a
method of arriving at truth, nor a theory of what knowledge
consists in. . . . What they did want was a method of evolving
what was involved in conceded propositions of the faith. N omi-
nalism is the process by which scholastic logic destroys itself.
It is the recognition of the fact that in its deductions from
universals syllogistic logic was merely analysing the meaning
of names. Hence the modern mind, in the effort to know the
truth about nature itself, discards it.” Such a logic serves a
purpose, for it has a value as a “practical though not as a specu-
lative science.” Attempts to raise it to the rank of a specula-
tive science, as an examination of formal thought, have failed;
for the ostensible result of pure thinking “is exactly the same
as its beginning,” and therefore represents no process of thought
whatever. “So long as the judgment stood, ‘all men are
mortal,’” says Green, “there was some color for saying that in
* II, Ig2.
* III, 53.
* II, I59–60.
* II, I6I.
THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE OBJECT. 3I
the judgment, ‘some mortals are men,' there was a further act of
thought: but put it as “all men = some mortals,’ and the con- .
version into ‘some mortals = all men' loses all appearance of
forming a further act of thought at all.”
With Locke, therefore, Green agrees that syllogistic or formal
logic can yield “no instructive propositions.” If we are to have
knowledge at all, inference must be possible, and in order that
inference should be possible logic must be more than formal
thinking. Formal logic has laid philosophy open to the charge
of putting into its premises whatever it desires to produce in its
conclusion. Philosophical method, however, is in no sense
identical with that of formal logic. The latter is the victim of a
deep seated fault which makes it absolutely incapable of dealing
with real inference, and therefore, with real knowledge. The
root of this weakness is of ancient origin. Green traces the diffi-
culty to Aristotle's failure to recognize the true and complete
force of the doctrine of the non-existence of the indeterminate.
The error of Aristotelian logic is that of identifying the first
determination of the 'sensible thing’ by thought with its com-
plete determination. Such a procedure leaves no room foº
expansion of knowledge. The “object of sense’ is crysta
in a name, and logic becomes little better than a game w
the words are counters or symbols of that which was once'ſ
reality but which is now lifeless abstraction. It represents
indolence of thought. There is a kind of inertia in all thinkſigº,
which has perpetually to be overcome if thought is to be kept
abreast of reality, and formal logic is an apotheosis of this
indolence. It depends upon crystallized notions and rigid
classes for its very existence. Having named a thing, the mind
rests content. When this kind of logic is identified with thought
it is easy to understand why protests are raised against the theory
that thought is adequate to reality. But is thought limited to
such a petty round of barren formalism? By no means, ac-
cording to Green. Such thought is thought which dies in its
infancy, or, to change the figure, is bound within arbitrary and
1 II, I64. Cf. I, 2I.
? I, 285.









32 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
accidental limits and becomes dwarfed. Its first movement,
he tells us, is its last so that it “is for ever retracing the first steps
of its childhood, which are represented by terms in received use;
that it is working a treadmill, which, when it fancies itself
laboriously ascending, brings it back to the simple predication of
being with which it really began.”
Green's language suggests a picture of formal logic as a kind of
abortive thought, or as thought which had been blighted in its
infancy. Moreover, this blight has vitiated the whole process
of thought just as a morbid condition of an organism blights or
destroys its entire function. The beginnings of formal logic
are, indeed, normal. The first determination of the object of
“real and essential, as contrasted with the mere object
of sense. It is determinate, and therefore something, while that
sense is
was nothing. . . . But this determinate form is capable of
infinitely numerous other determinations as it is brought into
other relations. In other words, our first knowledge of a thing
is not our ultimate knowledge of it; the first ‘form' is not the
final one; the mere universa, is a shell to be filled up by par-
r attributes.” Having thus once identified the essence
the first determination of the thing, logic becomes a barren
'ism in which thought is but a process of ascending “from
sile things to forms, and from the lower, i. e., the less ab-
ct and extensive forms, to the higher, i. e., the more abstract
2áſſi extensive.” The ‘sensible thing’ has been crystallized into
the class, and as such can only become the subject of judgments
in which it is “brought under a class more extensive than itself,
ſi. e., in which that is predicated of it which is already involved
in it.” “By such a process,” he continues, “its emptiness be-
comes yet more empty, and meanwhile the individual thing is
asserting its independence. Instead of being regarded as that
which becomes universal as soon as it is judged of or known, in
virtue of the property under which it is known, it is connected
with the universal as a thing with the class to which it belongs.
In this position it is vain to deny its priority and independence.
1 III, 61.
* III, 56.
* III, 59.







THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE OBJECT. 33
Thus individuals come to be regarded as one set of knowable
things, universals another.” Such crude realism which is
‘virtually nominalism’ holds the universal to be real “but it
finds the universal simply in the meaning of a name.” “It
makes its universal a class instead of a relation, and it takes as
the essential attributes of the class those only which are con-
noted by its name, i. e., the most superficial.”
In direct opposition to this entire scheme of the formal logi-
cians Green holds that the universal aspect of the object is
relation rather than class, and thinking is a progress “from the
less to the more determinate.” To begin with, the object is seen
to be related, as it were, only at one point; but it later shows
itself to be more and more related to each and every other
object. To be an object at all is to be related, but the relation
is at first only in germ. To the object at this stage we can
apply only the predicate of existence. But although existence
is the simplest and least determination, it is nevertheless a
determination of the object and therefore, removed in toto calo
from the object of sense, the indeterminate and the non-existent.
At this low point of determination the object is nebulous, a mere
‘this.’ It falls within a class but has this significance that it is
big with possibilities. It is “capable of infinitely numerous other
determinations as it is brought into other relations.”4
We have now reached the following conclusions. Th
is the object of knowledge and as such it “unites the twis.
of individuality and universality in the same way” as thought
does. “It is a centre of relations, which constitute its proper-
ties. As differenced from all things else by the sum of these
relations, it is individual, but to be so differenced from them all
it must have an element in common with them. If it be said that
it is individual, as momentarily presented to the sense, this
very presentation can only be known or named, i. e., can only
have any meaning, as one property or relation of the thing
amongst others.” The object is at once, “the individual uni- -
1 III, 57. 2 III, 60. * III, 61. 4 III, 56.
* III, 65. Green has used ‘individual' in this quotation in the loose sense of
‘particular." The meaning is, however, unambiguous and need not be in the least
confused with the technical use of the “individual as the synthesis of the universal
and the particular.'



34 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
versalized through its particular relations or qualities” and
“the universal individualized through its particularity.” This
process of individualization is a real process in which existence
becomes more and more determinate through relations. In this
sense the object may be said to be eternally incomplete; it is an
individual object not when it is securely coralled within a class
but in proportion as its implicit nature has been explicated by
this process of universalizing through relations. Such a theory
“admits in the fullest measure,” says Green, “that the individual
thing is real, and an object of knowledge, but maintains that it
is so only in virtue of a relation which is universal, and without
which the thing would have no intelligible properties at all.” –
1 III, 70.
2 III, 60.

CHAPTER III.
THE IMPLICATIONS OF OBJECTIVITY.
WE have now reached a point from which we may proceed to
an examination of Green's theory of consciousness which, as we
have observed, rests on an examination of the object. The ob-
ject has been exhibited as an individual, uniting particuliarity and
universality through its relations in an objective order. A-,
moment's reflection, however, will show that the term ‘relation' .
is as yet unexplained. We have, so to speak, made use of the
obvious fact of relations to portray the nature of objects, but
have not yet inquired into the nature of relations as such. We
have seen relations functioning in the world of objective things;
but have not investigated the source of such relations. It is the
º purpose of this chapter to inquire into the character and impli- f
cations of the relation which necessarily plays so large a part infº
every definition of the object; and to show in this way that the
subjective factor is really involved in objectivity." .****
ſ As long as the attention is fixed upon the object which is)
- ! being defined by relations, i. e., upon the content of the defini-; tı
| tion, we have no more need for a conscious subject than the
s astronomer who found no God when he swept the heavens with
* his telescope had for a God. Scientific theory is justly uſicon-
erned with such a subject. But, on the other hand, philosophy
* ſº permanently escape the notion that a definition is some-
how more than its content. It is by no means necessary to
separate the form from the content, but it seems to be necessary
to recognize that the content has a form. This recognition is a
distinct step in the history of mental development. The child-
like mind is always engulfed by the sheer objective reality, by
* Green's general contention that the object implies a subject is not based on
the mere fact that subject and object are correlative terms. Such formal reasoning
has been often used by philosophers, but Green is too well aware of the limitations
of formal logic to rest his case on any such procedure. The implication with
which he deals, as we shall soon discover, does not depend upon a superficial verbal
definition of the object, but upon an examination of its inmost nature.
35




36 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
the meaning of its environment, without any apparent reflection
upon the existence and nature of meaning itself. But upon a
closer scrutiny it discovers that in finding its way about among
other objects, and in dealing with them generally, it has always
been concerned with meaning. Like Monsieur Jourdain when
he discovered that he had been talking prose all his life, the mind
discovers a deeper lying reality when it begins to reflect upon the
meaning aspect of experience, although it has never known
anything else but meaning. When the mind has once grasped
the notion that the objective world is made up of relations, i. e.,
that it is the very essence of the object to be related, it is but
another step in the same direction to see that to be related is to
have a meaning.
But in meaning we have to do with a reality of a different order,
so far unlike the objects of experience that it cannot be dis-
cussed in terms appropriate to them. Objects of knowledge are
in time and space, or they are connected in a causal series; but
meaning is not related to objects as they are to each other.
Although it is through these relations that objects exist and
have a meaning, the meaning itself is unique. It is not, properly
speaking, an object of knowledge at all, and yet it is never
separated from objects or knowledge. If we define experience, as
Green does, as “matters of fact recognized as such,” we may
perhaps say that in discussing objects we have to do with matters
of faci recognized as such; while in discussing meaning we are
interested in matters of fact recognized as such. They are in-
separable but very different moments of a single reality. ,
The first step toward understanding the nature of meanifig is
to recognize that meaning and judgment are practically identical
in Green's system, or that meanimºsis always meaning for some
one and, therefore, in the form of judgment. Such an identi-
fication is no doubt wholly dependent upon how judgment is to
be defined or conceived. To begin with, a judgment must
obviously be distinguished from a proposition. The latter may
be defined as a meaning expressed in a conventional language;
perhaps it must even be still more limited in form to a subject
and predicate bound together by a copula. At any rate, we see
THE IMPLICATIONS OF OBJECTIVITY. 37
at a glance that if judgment were to be so defined it would be a
much narrower term than meaning; for meaning may be ex-
pressed by a single word, a gesture, or even an inhibition of
movement." Therefore, while every proposition probably repre-
sents a meaning,” it is not impossible that meaning may occur -
independently of propositions taken in this narrow sense. A
judgment, on the contrary, is an act of knowledge which, regard- || >
less of its form of expression, deals intimately with the very rela-2
tions which have been shown to constitute the objective order.
To know, to judge, is first of all to apprehend a meaning. This
brands every judgment, therefore, as an expression of meaning,
and every meaning as a judgment. Like meaning, judgment is a ſ
distinctive characteristic, not of the merely objective phase of |
experience, but of concrete experience which has been defined as
matters of fact recognized as such. Like meaning also it is not
related to things as they are related to each other in terms of
time, space, cause and effect, et cetera. Causality, for instance,
is an intelligible relation, strictly adapted to the formation of
judgment; but as an intelligible relation, it is neither the cause .
nor the effect of anything else. The same arguments apply in
the case of space and time. Judgment is not another thing in
space nor an event in time. In the judgment ‘something is therd
now,' which is perhaps as abstract as any judgment, we immedia
ately note that “there’ is distinguished from “here,' and ‘now’ ...
from some other time, past, or future, or both. The judgment, r
however, is neither here nor there, now nor then, unless we
identify the written or spoken words with the act of knowledge,
which they emphatically are not. Judgment is rather the organic
unity of differences; the meaning of ‘now’ or of ‘this.' We
may, therefore, conclude that judgment is the meaning aspect of
things, or, if we prefer it, that meaning is meaning for some-
body, i. e., judgment.
* Perhaps it may be shown that meaning is sometimes merely apprehended but
unexpressed. This is, however, a psychological rather than a logical problem.
* Not every proposition as given represents a meaning in the mind of the speaker
or writer, but every intelligible group of words represents a meaning for somebody
at some time.
* On the other hand, it must not be forgotten that the differences which are
unified in the judgment remain as differences. No judgment can be formed
which is not in this sense both universal and particular.

38 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
Not only does meaning turn out to be the same as judgment;
but when we reconsider Green's conception of fact as that which
‘c has meaning we see at once that even a fact in this sense is already
| a judgment. The truth is that facts, like judgments, are beyond
the reach of the mechanical categories. No fact, as such, exists
gin space or time, and no fact is the cause of another fact. Facts
ºf exist only-in-experience, where in has no spatial significance.
"The world of facts is, therefore, the intelligible world. Space,
time, and all the other categories are, no doubt, indispensible
principles of intelligibility, but, as principles, are not related to
intelligibility in a further hypothetical space and time, or in any
external fashion whatever. As judgment is, for Green, the
true type of knowledge or experience, it can “neither be consti-
tuted by events of which it is the experience, nor be a product of
them.” But such a statement concerning judgment applies
mutatis mutandis to all other terms which explicitly refer to the
intelligible aspect of the universe. . Meaning, judgment, fact,
are neither things nor events, as such, but the intelligible nature
of things and events. Green's actual treatment of judgment
ſhas, therefore, already been foreshadowed in his treatment of
*the objectas relation and of facts as meaningful. For this reason
\it will not be necessary to dwell upon the subject of judgment at
length in this chapter, but only to emphasize certain views,
touched upon in the preceeding chapters, from this slightly $
modified standpoint.
> First, judgment is the simplest component of knowledgeø
s/ This view is exactly parallel to the theory noted above, that the
unmeaning fact does not exist, and is diametrically opposed to
the one commonly held that knowledge is built up out of sensas,
_tions, or in the language of Locke, out of “simple ideas which w8) 8,
\º do not make for ourselves." According to the latter theory, -
judgment is a “mechanical combination of parts which remain
outside each other.” This is to make judgment and proposition
virtually synonymous. Against all such theoriesGreen opposes
w the view that “the simplest fact” of sense impression “is already
T--~~~ ~ * . . . .----------. -------------------- * * * ***-* - - -- . .
Prolegomena, section 16.
* Bosanquet, Logic (second edition), I, 3I.
THE IMPLICATIONS OF OBJECTIVITY. 39
*
not a feeling but an explanation of a feeling.” Following
Locke, British classical philosophy held firmly to the ‘simple
idea’ which was supposed to be the “datum or material of the
mind, upon which it performs certain operations as upon some-
thing other than itself.” “The fact is,” says Green, “that the
simple idea with Locke, as the beginning of knowledge, is already
at its minimum, the judgment, I have an idea different from other
ideas, which I did not make for myself.” Here we have the
keynote of Green's criticism of sensationalism. To be a sensa-
tion means to be distinguished from other sensations. No con-
sciousness could be built up out of a succession of present im-
pressions unless the present were in some sense bound up with
the past and the future. Green's own language is vigorous and
conclusive: “If we take as the germ of intelligent experience the
simple consciousness of a sensation, this can only be expressed
as the judgment ‘something is here.” The “here,'—however, is |
the next moment a ‘there’; the one sensation is-superseded by ! :
another.” The only datum of sense which can contribute in.
any way to knowledge is, therefore, already a judgment; or in J.
other words, the judgment is the simplest element Of Knowledge. …
Secondly, judgment is a process of individualization, i. e., the
process of combining unity and variety. Reference has already
been made to the process of definition through which the object
gets its individuality. But definition does not take place in
abstraction from knowledge; on the contrary, it is only in and
through knowledge that definitions arise. To define the sº
is to give it a centent, not merely to name it. Even the most
abstract definitions of formal logic reveal this essentially concrete
characteristic. We may take, as an instance, the definition,
“Gold is a .*.*.*. in which we have
given the traditional formal requirements of a definition—the
genus and the differentia. It is to be noted, however, that Gold
is not merely a name, as would be the case if we should say
“Gold is Gold'; but in our definition Gold is arranged or given a

1 I, 282.
* I, 19.
8 Ibid.
* III, 52. Quoted above, p. 22.
40. INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
place in a system of knowledge; it is set off from other things.
This extreme case illustrates the principle that identity and differ-
ence are indispensible to even the most unsatisfactory definition
which can be called a definition at all. Indeed, the same thing
may be discovered in the nebulous definitions which we give of
Jº our vaguest knowledge. ‘A stalactite is a kind of stone,' or,
“Pumpernickel is a kind of bread’ may be taken as examples of
the barest knowledge, but here the differentia, if not quite
explicit, is, nevertheless, implied in. the phrase “a kind of,' so
common in everyday speech. Now this process of individu-
alization, or of giving content to objects, is in reality judgment,
for in the same sense that definition individualizes the particular
object through universal relations, judgment holds its terms
together, but at the same time holds them apart, i. e., it deals
with identity in difference. Green's rejection of the so-called
equational logic, to which we have referred on a previous page,
is based on the notion that judgment is a great deal more than an
expression of identity; it must also express difference. In
* Green's own words, judgment “integrates just so far as it differ-
entiates. Beginning with a simple assertion of being or identity
with self, A is A, it goes on to bring A into relation to some other
object, which in like manner has been arrested in its flux, . . . .
This relation gives a contrast and difference. A is not B. But
as not B it is something more than mere A. The difference has
not taken something from it but added something to it. It has
not become a fraction of what it was before but a fuller integer.
It is no longer a bare unit, but a unity of differences, a center of
º manifold relations, a subject of properties. It is not an abstract
universal, but it has an element of universality in virtue of which
it can be brought into relation to all things else. Its universality
is the condition of its particularization.” -
This brings us to the third, and for the present purpose the
most important, characteristic of judgment. Judgment is the
germ of all knowledge, i. e., any judgment is capable of being
developed further and further toward an ultimate system of
knowledge. This is again exactly parallel with Green's conten-
! III, 63.
t
s
ſ * * ~.
} `" ----—-—— -
*~"
THE IMPLICATIONS OF OBJECTIVITY. 4I
tion that the object is capable of infinitely numerous determina-
tions. His belief that Aristotelian logic is wrong in identifying
the first definition with complete definition is thus borne out by
his own positive theory of the development of judgment. “The
first act of thinking or knowing,” he says, “is the judgment
‘something is,' and the predicate of this judgment, ‘being,” or the
simple relation which it expresses, becomes gradually a subject
of more and more determinate properties, as in successive judg-
ments it is brought into new relations.” This means that no
judgment is self-sufficient; that it is never complete, but always
in the process of becoming complete by breaking down or giving
way to a further and more concrete judgment. This is, indeed,
but the other side of his contention that the first definition of an
object is not the final or complete one; but when it is stated in
this form it is seen to be essentially identical with the theory
commonly advanced that all judgments are hypothetical.”
Philosophy has practically abandoned the hope of the older
rationalists that a single axiom or set of axioms could be found
from which all other judgments may be deduced after the manner
of Euclidean geometry. This general conviction, however,
admits two very different interpretations. On the one hand, it
leads to a relativism of the most indefensible variety. N o
sooner are some people convinced that there is no universal and
necessary truth than they straightway conclude that there is no
truth at all in the sense in which mankind has always believed
in an objective truth. - -
On the other hand, a belief in the hypothetical character of
judgment may mean, as it usually does in logical discussion,
merely that any given judgment is essentially finite and incom-
plete. Such an interpretation, while holding to the doctrine of
the relativity of knowledge, is a very different view from the one
commonly called relativism. The former is a logical or critical
methodology and leads deeper into the questions of philosophy;
the latter is uncritical dogmatism which leads nowhere, except
* III, 60. The thought expressed in this passage is clearly similar to the general
Hegelian notion of the process of dialectic.
* Cf. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, Chapter XXIV, p. 361; Principles of
Logic, Bk. I, Chapter II; Bosanquet, Logic (second edition), I, 88 ff., 238 f.
*
42 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
perhaps to its own destruction. No thoroughgoing thought can
long remain ignorant of the far-reaching implications of the
doctrine that every judgment is incomplete; for the hypothetical
and categorical aspects of judgment can be neither permanently
nor completely separated. They hang together in such a way
that both must be recognized in any true account of knowledge.
It is indeed the abstract separation of the two which has brought
about the absurdities of extreme absolutism, on the one hand,
and extreme relativism, on the other. Every hypothetical judg-
ment, after all, is intimately connected with a categorical judg-
ment, since it postulates something categorical regarding the
nature of the whole of reality. This has been variously ex-
pressed by saying that the ultimate subject of every judgment is
reality, or that every judgment claims validity. “All hypo-
, thetical judgment,” says Bosanquet, “rests on a categorical
basis. That is to say, all relativity rests on an absolute datum
"and all necessity on fact. . . . Individuality is in self-relation,
N ecessity is in external relation.” -
Green fully agrees with the latter interpretation of the hypo-
thetical nature of judgment. Eevery judgment is, indeed, in-
complete and finite, but every judgment is also a judgment about
the real nature of things. The ‘if so—then so’ gets its sig-
nificance from its categorical reference to reality. While recog-
nizing, therefore, that all given judgments are incomplete Green
really gives his attention to the implication of such a doctrine.
2. The implication is briefly this, that there is a nature of things, a
reality back of every relativity, through which the relativity gets
its meaning; that finitude, by its very nature, looks beyond
itself to a completion of itself in the infinite.” In his philosophy
1. Cf. Bosanquet, Logic, I, 71 ff., and Bradley, Principles of Logic, p. 365 ff.
* Logic, I, 241-242. See also I, 225. “We have self-relation, existence, or a
categorical aspect, and external relation, necessity, or a hypothetical aspect.”
* Bosanquet speaks in this connection of...the self as a “finite-infinite being.”
Cf. The Value and Destiny of the Individual (I913). Although a later chapter will
deal specifically with the relation of the finite and the infinite, attention may be
called at this point to the direct bearing which Green's theory of the incomplete
character of judgment must have upon his ultimate conception of God. Judgment
is not only incomplete, but it is becoming more complete. Whatever Green's notion
of God may prove to be, we may be quite sure that his God is to be found, if at
THE IMPLICATIONS OF OBJECTIVITY. 43
the emphasis is frankly laid on the ideally complete system as a
basis for the successive steps of the judging activity rather than
upon the finite character of each of the successive steps. If he
tends to emphasize the categorical basis of hypothetical judg-
ments rather more than later writers do, it is chiefly because his
interest is clearly with what Bosanquet has called “individuality
as self-relation” rather than with “relativity as external /
relation.”
In the foregoing argument we have constantly observed
Green's recourse to an explanatory principle other than the terms
of the phenomenal series. How shall we conceive this principle?
Regardless of the particular word which he uses, whether mean-
ing, fact, relation, or judgment, he never fails to call attention
to a phase of experience or a principle within experience which
defies classification as one of the natural objects. We would go
astray in thinking of this principle of relation or meaning as
outside of, or beyond the series; but yet we are not permitted
to identify it with any member of the series or with their sum.
It is a principle of organization throughout the series. One fact .
does not exist for another, nor does the relation between the
two exist for a third fact, nor yet for a fusion of the first two.
* -- *
4’,”
The several facts exist together and yet they retain their sever-
alty. When matters of fact are recognized as such, we have to do
with a synthesis involving more than a sum, or mere aggregate
of parts; we do indeed have unity, but a unity in which the parts
are organized. On the other hand, we have a variety in which
unity is immanent. Such a unity in variety in the case of
objects has been previously designated ‘individuality’ which
at once suggests the possibility of applying the category of
individuality to our concrete experience. Is it not probable that
individuality characterizes experience as a whole just as it does
the items of experience which we have examined? If we answer
in the affirmative we must say that objects are not only indi-
viduals through relation, but the experience of a world of objects,
all, at the end of a series of judgments, progressively more and more concrete. It
is to be kept steadily in mind that Green is fully committed to a conception of the
infinite, or absolute, as the result of a process of greater and greater determination
rather than as the outcome of a process of abstraction.
44 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
i.e., the system of relations which we know, is itself an individual
combining unity and variety. This is, in fact, the hypothesis
upon which Green's further speculation proceeds. From now
on we shall be concerned in tracing his attempt to deal with
finite experience and eventually with the ideally complete experi-
ence in terms of individuality.
This individuality of experience is, moreover, uniformly
treated as a principle, not as a thing. Green sometimes expresses
this idea by saying that in experience, or reality, there is a
2^º principle’ which cannot be accounted for by a natural
istory. In dealing with concrete experience we leave the plane
of things and strive for the plane of principles; for wherever we
find facts or a distinction between truth and falsehood, i. e.,
wherever we have the function of judgment, Green believes that
we may justly assume that we have to deal with a spiritual
principle rather than with a natural thing.
The spiritual principle, however, refers to no supernatural
entity, or substance, or power of any kind, but is simply a way of
designating the aspect of meaning or organization in what-
soever is. Green's contention, therefore, that there is a spiritual
principle in nature is only that nature to its remotest parts means
something; there is no place for the unrelated, unmeaning thing-
in-itself. No ‘natural history' can be given of this spiritual
principle in nature; for the immanent relation must be presup-
posed as the condition of tracing its origin. His contention that
there is a spiritual principle in knowledge is, again, simply that
knowledge to its remotest element is meaningful, or in the form
of judgment. There is no place for the unmeaning fact, the
unmediated datum of sense. The particular in both cases is
| already, through meaning, more than a mere particular; it is,
l
~ *
in fact, a universal particular—the individual, i. e., the particular
§ universalized through relations which constitute its individuality.
With such a principle of organization we are familiar in what
we know as our intelligence. Our consciousness is, so to speak,
at the center of the individuality of experience. The relations,
and the judgments expressive of them are focused in a self-
conscious, intelligent subject. The whole rational, purposive
THE IMPLICATIONS OF OBJECTIVITY. 45
agent, the subject of these objects of experience is thus literally
implied—folded up—in such objectivity. This is at once a
unique and a new factor in the problem before us of getting at the
nature of experience. “No one and no number of a series of
related events,” says Green, in emphatic summary, “can be the
consciousness of the series as related.”
We have now shown that the relation which exists between
objects is already meaning or judgment; it does not have to wait
to be put into words. But judgment or relation is a reality of al
unique character. Hitherto we have been dealing with objects
related to one another; but when we consider the relation itself
we find that the relation is not related as object to object. It is
throughout the series, but not a member of the series. It is not
a fact, but the meaning of fact. The meaning of fact, however,
does not exist for another fact, nor for a sum of facts, but for a
principle through which they are significant, i. e., through which
they are facts. Such a principle has been tentatively identified
with what we know as our intelligence—in a word, with con-
sciousness in its broadest sense. It is this implied “conscious-
ness of the series as related” which we have next to examine
more in detail.
* Prolegomena, section I6.
CHAPTER IV.
THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE SUBJECT.
IN harmony with Green's plan to found the theory of con-
sciousness upon an examination of objects, the discussion, up to
this point, has been carried on as far as possible without reference
to a theory of consciousness. Objectivity, however, has been
shown to involve a principle of organization, not itself one of
the objects, but that through which objects are possible. This
principle of organization has also been tentatively identified with
consciousness. The purpose of this chapter is to examine
Green's conception of consciousness somewhat more in detail and
especially to show how consciousness, as the subject of knowledge,
is distinguished in his system from the objects of knowledge.
There are two typical methods of dealing with consciousness.
First, it may be treated as an inner being or ego, of the existence
of which we are immediately certain. This view is typified by
the Cartesian expression cogito ergo sum. Second, it may be
treated as an object of knowledge, subject to observation and
quasi-mechanical explanation. The second view is typified by
the procedure of Locke, who believed that he could discover the
mature of consciousness by ‘looking within his own mind to see
how it wrought.” Both of these extreme views are rejected by
“Green, as we shall see in what immediately follows. In opposi-
tion to the former, he holds that knowledge of consciousness, far
from being given to us intuitively as an immediate certainty, is
arrived at only after a severe process of reflection, and the medi-
ation of thought. In opposition to the latter, he holds that
living consciousness is never an object but always the subject
of knowledge. In support of the latter thesis he proposes to
show that whenever consciousness is made an object of knowledge
it is falsified; that when it is explained in quasi-mechanical terms
its spirit is gone, leaving only an empty husk behind."
* Compare with this Bergson's statement that psychology can never deal with
the true moi qui dure. The ultimate self eludes the grasp of the categories appro-
46
THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE SUBJECT. 47
Philosophies of the first type have taken various forms, but
there are some general features common to all. They agree in
treating the existence of the self as more certain than anything
else. They are ready with Descartes to doubt the existence of
all objects in the whole world but to hold to the existence of a
doubter." The self, or subject, thus obtained is a pure, somewhat
mystical ‘ego,' given to us, we are told, by a sort of immediate
intuitition. By taking this intuitive self-knowledge as a starting
point we are supposed to be able to deduce all other knowledge
from it; it alone being the root of the tree of knowledge.”
We have already seen that Green distrusts such a philosophy,”
for it makes a wrong beginning which has laid idealism open to
the charge of subjectivism. Common sense has fortunately
refused to accept such a theory, because common sense is really
much more immediately aware of objects than of a self. With-
out the doubtful aid of a formal dialectic no man doubts the
existence of an objective world, although many men remain
strangely unaware of selfhood.” So far, it is safer to follow the
lead of plain thinking. If either term is to be deduced we may
more properly begin with the object than with the subject.
No conscious being can be ignorant of an objective world; for
consciousness is first of all concerned with content. On the other
hand, although consciousness would be impossible without its
subjective aspect, the subject is hidden, as it were, beneath the
objective order. The consciousness of selfhood is the goal or
result of thinking, rather than its beginning. We become aware
priate to a space world of identities. Up to this point Bergson and Green are in
direct agreement. They do not, however, agree in a positive characterization of
consciousness. Bergson tends to place consciousness beyond thought and to treat
it as an object of immediate intuition, while Green simply places it beyond this
type of thinking, although not beyond all rational conception, as we shall point
out below.
1. Cf. Bergson, Creative Evolution (Mitchell's translation, 1911), p. I.
* The classic example of this position is, of course, found in Descartes.
* Cf. Chapter I.
* Cf. J. M. Baldwin, Social and Ethical Interpretations (4th edition); also Royce,
Studies in Good and Evil (1899), pp. 143 ff. Royce quotes Fichte's declaration
that “Most men could be more easily brought to believe themselves a piece of
lava in the moon than to regard themselves as a self,” p. I48; James Ward,
The Realm of Ends (1911), p. 128 f.
48 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
of it only after a certain stage in the development of knowledge
has been reached.
The other type of philosophy, of which Locke may be taken as
a typical representative, looks upon consciousness as the subject
matter of the science of psychology. From this point of view
ideas are regarded as phenomena of consciousness, and con-
sciousness itself, as an object of knowledge," which may be de-
scribed or otherwise dealt with as the purposes of the science
dictate. For Locke the task of philosophy was compassed by
looking within his own mind to see how it wrought. Hume
later essayed the task of building a true “science of man” upon
the basis of observed experience, to take the place of “any
hypothesis, that pretends to discover the ultimate original quali-
ties of human nature.” But the experience within which he
proposes to confine his investigations turns out to be an experi-
ence objectified, anatomized, in short, an object of knowledge
rather than the concrete living reality of knowledge itself.
“For to me it seems evident,” writes Hume in the ‘Introduction'
to A Treatise of Human Nature, “that the essence of mind being
equally unknown to us with that of external bodies, it must be
equally impossible to form any notion of its powers and qualities
otherwise than from careful and exact experiments, and the
observation of those particular effects, which result from its differ-
ent circumstances and situations.” The assumption of both
Locke and Hume seems to be that if consciousness is to be known
at all our knowledge of it must somehow be gained by what they
term “observation.’ Hume contrasts the knowledge gained by
observation which is to result in a ‘science of man,’ with the
hypothetical or speculative knowledge of philosophers which
results only in pretended knowledge of the ultimate qualities of
human nature. Although Hume was doubtless right in rejecting
the pretentious speculations of metaphysicians who gloried in the
fact that their theories were uncontaminated by contact with
experience, he certainly was wrong in supposing that observation
1. Cf. Creative Evolution, p. 1 ff. Bergson's treatment of consciousness seems to
illustrate both the intuitive and the psychological method.
* A Treatise of Human Nature (Selby-Bigge edition, 1896), p. xxi.
* A Treatise of Human Nature (Selby-Bigge edition, 1896), p. xxi. Italics mine.
THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE SUBJECT. 49
and experiment could answer all the legitimate questions which
arise regarding the nature of consciousness, or experience in
general.
There is a sense surely in which consciusness may become
the object of knowledge, but there is also a sense in which the
consciousness of objects is properly distinguished from the objects
of consciousness. It always takes a consciousness to observe a
consciousness, or in more technical language, there is a logical
as well as a psychological aspect of consciousness. It is the
logical question which interests Green. Admitting freely that
consciousness may be an object of knowledge, he goes on to
inquire about consciousness as the subject of knowledge. Psy-
chology is certainly a worthy science, but there is a prior and more
fundamental business for philosophy than the business of observ-
ing and describing consciousness. Philosophers must relate
consciousness to the universe which consciousness knows and in
which it has the power of placing itself among its own objects.
A metaphysic of consciousness is, therefore, just as much needed
as a psychology of consciousness, and, for better or for worse,
it does pretend “to discover the ultimate original qualities of
human nature” which lie beyond the arbitrary limits of obser-
vation implied in Hume's definition of experience, although not,
of course, beyond experience more broadly conceived. The
‘consciousness’ in which Green is interested, therefore, is not
the self or consciousness with which psychology deals. Such a
consciousness, by hypothesis, is, and remains, an object of
knowledge: it is the being whom I know, rather than ‘I’
who know. Green most emphatically declares that he is not
concerned with the “phenomena of consciousness.’ “The phe-
nomena of matter, the phenomena of consciousness, the con-
nection between the two sets of phenomena,” he writes, “equally
belong to an objective world, of which the objectivity is only
possible for a subject.” He is concerned with the subject of
knowledge, which, though not at first as apparent as the object,
is later seen to be the very condition of the possibility of the
objective world. The subject of knowledge is, he says, that
1 I, 387.
50 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
“which we do not know but are, and through which we know.”
This statement does not commit Green to any form of agnosticism
regarding the nature of the self; for the point which he is empha-
sizing is that the self is not to be known as one object among
others by means of the mechanical categories. In what sense
it is known, and under what category, will best appear by an
elimination of some of the categories which serve an excellent
purpose in dealing with objects, but which show themselves to be
inadequate whenever an attempt is made to apply them to the
nature of the subject.
“The dominant notion of the self in Locke,” says Green, “is
that of the inward substance, or ‘substratum of ideas,' coördinate
with the outward.” Here we have the very root of the Lockean
philosophy, to the destruction of which Green set himself in the
Introduction to Hume's Treatise of Human Nature. “There are
two propositions on which Locke is constantly insisting,” he
says, “one, that the object of his investigation is his own mind,
the other, that his attitude toward this object is that of mere
observation. He speaks of his own mind, it is to be noticed,
just as he might of his own body. . . . He, just as much as the
untutored Cartesian, regarded the ‘minds' of different men as so
many different things.” The legitimate outcome of such a con-
ception of the self is found in Hume's famous testimony: “For
my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself,
I always stumble on some particular perception or other, . . .
I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and
never can observe anything but the perception.” Any attempt
such as Hume's is foredoomed to failure because it sets out in
quest of that which is not to be found in heaven or earth, viz.,
a substance without attributes. But it is especially futile to
search for consciousness under the form of substance; for it is
through consciousness that substance gets whatever meaning
it has.
Regardless of the terms in which it may be defined, substance
1 III, 267.
* I, Io&.
8 I, 6.
*A Treatise of Human Nature, p. 252. Cf. p. 635.
} %
THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE SUBJECT. 5I
is sure to be conceived as a thing; if not in space, at least coördi-
nate with things in space. It is something which excludes
something else. Substances may be lined up in a row and num-
bered or labeled by intelligence. Substance is clearly an object
of knowledge, and no qualification of substance as ‘thinking’
can redeem it from its position as an object of knowledge to a
position as a subject of knowledge. The subject of knowledge
and the object of knowledge are as eternally distinct as the two
ends of a stick are distinct." A philosophy, therefore, which
treats mind as an inner substance treats it merely as an object
of knowledge. Mind, which constitutes both the inner and the
Outer, is, in the language of Green, “treated as itself the inner
“substratum which it accustoms itself to suppose.’ It thus
becomes the creature of its own suppositions. Nor is this all.
This, indeed, is no more than the fate which it must suffer at the
hands of every philosopher who, in Kantian language, brings the
source of the Categories under the Categories.” Even if an
object could be supposed to know itself as a substance among
other similar objects, the knowledge thereof would still remain
something quite different from a substance. Or suppose we
agree to treat the self as a thing which has a consciousness of
objects, we do not in the least advance toward giving an account
of the consciousness of which the self is thus made a bearer.
Whether or not we are convinced that the self is a thing, we still
face the ultimate fact of the consciousness of objects, and this
consciousness itself refuses to be treated as a thing. However
far we force the matter back, we are driven sooner or later to
admit a definite and fundamental difference between objects and
consciousness of objects. We discover, moreover, that nothing
whatever is to be gained by the device of supposing a substance
as a supporter or possessor of consciousness. Such a super-
numerary has long been on the retired list in philosophical dis-
cussion. We will therefore avoid pedantry by continuing to use
‘consciousness' and ‘self' as synonymous terms.
1. Cf. Hegel's criticism of Spinoza's conception of substance and his estimate
of the advance made by philosophy when it came to deal with ‘subject.” Logic,
translated by Wallace, sec. I5I.
* I, IIo.
52 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
Any theory which looks upon the self as an inner substance
is, moreover, destined to become involved in the false antithesis
of an “internal’ and an ‘external’ world. These two worlds
represent what we usually understand by the psychical and the
physical. The so-called internal world is the world of subjective
experience, psychic states, etc., while the external world is the
world of space and matter. No one can deny that the psychical
and the physical are properly distinguished, but what meaning
can we attach to the epithets ‘internal’ and ‘external'? We
might as well call the one blue and the other red. This antithesis
gets its force from our tendency to think of consciousness as an
object of knowledge. But whenever psychic states are treated
as objects of knowledge they are exactly coördinate with all
other objects of knowledge and come under the same rubrics."
The moment we pass, however, from mind as an object of know-
ledge to mind as the subject of knowledge we must use different
tactics. The subject of knowledge cannot be a thing or sub-
stance. The so-called external world may, indeed, be external
to the human body, inasmuch as the body also is in space; but
how can it be external to the consciousness of externality? To
speak of things as “outside the mind” is “nonsense,” says
Green.”
Space or extension is real as the “relation of mutual ex-
ternality.” But the relation of ‘mutual externality’ is meaning,
judgment, knowledge, and is, therefore, not inside or outside of
anything.” It is quite appropriate to speak of a consciousness
of space, but perfectly unmeaning to speak of a consciousness in
space. ‘Things' unquestionably exist in space, but consciousness
* Much discussion of the relation of mind and body has never risen above the
plane of weighing one object over against another. In such discussions there is a
constant tendency to treat mind as an object of knowledge. (Cf. Bradley, Appear-
ance and Reality, Chapter XXIII.) For this reason it is better to substitute
Green's terms ‘subject' and “object' for “mind' and “body' of the older dispu-
tations.
* II, 200; also I, 482, and Prolegomena, sections 60 and 64.
* I, 228; also II, 16.
* Cf. Prolegomena, sections 52 and 60. Cf. Bergson's statement: “To ask
whether the universe exists only in our thought, or outside of our thought, is to
put the problem in terms that are insoluble, even if we suppose them to be intel-
ligible;” Matter and Memory (translated by Paul and Palmer, 1911), p. 13.
THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE SUBJECT. 53
as subject is not a ‘thing.” Nothing is to be gained by such a
confusion between thought and its object. They are eternally
distinguished, although never separated, or separable. Their
distinction, however, can not be put in quasi-spatial terms; one
is not “here,' the other ‘there,' nor is one ‘this’ and the other
‘that.' Green has summed up his distinction between things
and the consciousness of things in the following language: “A
motion can only be a motion, or a configuration a configuration,
for a subject to which every stage of the one, every part of the
other, is equally present with the rest; and what is such a subject
but conscious?”
The attempt to conceive the mind as an inner substance fails,
therefore, because it is an attempt to spatialize the meaning or
knowledge of space. A corresponding error results from an
attempt to place consciousness in time. As the older British
philosophy had undertaken an account of the self in terms of
substance, so the newer philosophy, that of Green's own time,
was trying to conceive consciousness in terms of an event. Con-
sciousness was to be explained by reference to events which
preceded it. It was to take its place in the evolutionary series
as one step in the progress. Against all this Green raises his
characteristic protest: Consciousness cannot be a member of the
series of events of which it is the consciousness. Phenomena are
always in time, but meaning or the consciousness of phenomena
is not a phenomenon.” Nothing in Green's philosophy has
caused more perplexity than his contention that a ‘natural
history' of consciousness is impossible.” This has been taken as
a denial of the general laws of biological evolution. While there
is no real basis for such a supposition, it must be admitted that
Green allows himself to use expressions which, if taken by them-
selves, could be so interpreted. He distinctly declares, for
* I, 379.
* Prolegomena, sec. 57.
* By “natural history’ Green referred to the kind of genetic account which
seeks to place a phenomenon in a temporal series, to tell what preceded it, or when
it arose in a larger history. Such a history may indeed be written about con-
sciousness in so far as consciousness is a phenomenon, but it is altogether beside
the mark or even impossible when we study consciousness as subject.
54 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
instance, that man is not a part of nature." That the spirit of
such a declaration, however, transcends the letter is made
perfectly evident by his qualification of the word ‘man.’ It is
man “for whom there is a cosmos of experience” of whom no
“natural history' can be written, or it is the “principle in man
which knows nature” that is not to be looked upon as a ‘part of
nature.” When the matter is put in this way the contention that
a ‘natural history’ of consciousness is impossible becomes not
only defensible, but quite unquestionable or even commonplace.
In whatever sense man is a member of the biological series man
is a part of nature; but there is a sense in which man is a knower
of the series, a formulator of its laws, and it is in the latter sense
that he is not “an event or the product of an event.” Green’s
contention, that the knower is not in time, is preposterous if the
“knower’ means the psychic individual ‘who rides in a coach from
Oxford to London,’ but the ‘knower' with which Green is con-
cerned means nothing of the kind. The “knower’ means for
him not only the logical or metaphyscial subject of knowledge;
but it means that subject in its peculiar and single character of
subjectivity.
“There could be no such thing as time,” says Green, plainly
enough, “if there were not a self-consciousness which is not in
time.” It must be remembered that ‘self-consciousness’
is not the man who rides in a coach, or who was born on a certain
day. Each man is born, passes through certain changes, and
dies. Such facts are not here in question. Nor are we discussing
mere change as it occurs in psychic processes; but the question is,
What is presupposed in the ‘consciousness of change’?” It is
the consciousness of change which he declares can “neither be
constituted by events of which it is the experience, nor be a
product of them.” In a similar argument he writes: “We may
decide all the questions that have been debated between materi-
alists and spiritualists as to the explanation of particular facts
in favor of the former, but the possibility of explaining them at
* Prolegomena, sec. 5.
* Ibid., sec. 52. See also I, I28.
* Ibid., sec. I5 and I6.
* Ibid., sec. I6.
THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE SUBJECT. 55
all will still remain to be explained. We shall still be logically
bound to admit that in a man who can know a nature—for
whom there is a ‘cosmos of experience’—there is a principle which
is not natural and which cannot without a to repov Tpórepov be
explained as we explain the facts of nature.” “That which
happens,” he says, “whether we reckon it an inward or an out-
ward, a physical or a psychical event—and nothing but an event
can, properly speaking, be observed—is as such in time. But
the presence of consciousness to itself, though, as the true
“punctum stans’ (Locke, Essay II, Chap. XVII, sec. 16) it is
the condition of the observation of events in time, is not such
an event itself. In the ordinary and proper sense of ‘fact,' it is
not a fact at all, nor yet a possible abstraction from facts.”
In a similar connection he writes, “some suspicion may perhaps
be created that a natural history of self-consciousness, and of the
conceptions by which it makes the world its own, is impossible,
since such a history must be of events, and self-consciousness is
not reducible to a series of events.” “Should the question be
still asked,” says Nettleship, in his Memoir of Green, “If the
self-consciousness implied in moral action is not derived from
nature or circumstances, what then is its origin? the answer must
be that it has no origin. “It never began because it never was
not. It is the condition of there being such a thing as beginning
or end.’”4
Such statements are likely to excite suspicion in the minds
of those who are accustomed to rely upon evolutionary explana-
tion as the only valid and sufficient solution of human problems;
and they appear especially objectionable when taken out of
their context and allowed to stand as bald assertions. A more
careful interpretation of Green's language and a more sympa-
thetic appreciation of his spirit will, however, dispel these mis-
understandings. The “eternal self” may not be such a fearful
1 Prolegomena, sec. 9. “By calling the principle not natural,” says Green,
“we mean that it is neither included among the phenomena which through its
presence to them form a nature, nor consists in their series, nor is itself determined
by any of the relations which it constitutes among them.” Prolegomena, sec. 54.
* I, I.21.
s I, I66.
* III, czzxiii.
56 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
monster as some have imagined. In order to understand what
Green had in mind we cannot insist too often that it is not the
psychological self with which we have to do. This is of primary
importance since Green's critics persistently fall into the error
of treating him as a psychologist rather than as a metaphysician.
He does not undertake to defend the existence of the eternal
self by means of psychological introspection or by appeal to any
data of consciousness whatever. His interest is to show that an
eternal consciousness as the subject of knowledge is implied in
the existence of objects. The facts of consciousness exist in time
just as much for Green as they do for the psychologist. As
events, the events of consciousness transpire just as really for
Green's theory as they do for common-sense. His contention
is simply and solely that the meaning of time, that is, the con-
sciousness of time, is not an event. g
A representative criticism of Green which illustrates this
psychological bias is to be found in Professor A. E. Taylor's
The Problem of Conduct. The burden of Taylor's disagreement
with Green is that ethics is not dependent on metaphysics as
Green taught. Inasmuch as this question is not germane to our
present purpose, we pass at once to the incidental criticism of
Green's conception of the self. In opposition to Green, Taylor
makes what he himself calls two “rather sweeping assertions.”
They are: “(I) There is no such thing as the Eternal Self, in
Green's sense of the term; (2) if there were such a thing as the
Eternal Self, it would be of no value for the purposes of the
student of Ethics.” Although both of the statements are indeed
“rather sweeping,' if we were to emphasize the conspicuous word
thing, we should have assertions with which Green himself would
heartily agree. That this suggestion is not a mere cavil will
appear as we proceed to a discussion of Mr. Taylor's strictures.
“What Green intended to prove,” he writes, "was, of course,
that the individual consciousness of each of us, on one side *
least, is something which is not a result of ‘natural forces,’
has not had a beginning in time nor in history, and consequently
cannot be adequately described by the methods of ‘natural' or
* The Problem of Conduct (1901), p. 65.
THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE SUBJECT. 57
“empirical' science.” So far, this passage gives an accurate
statement of Green's purpose, but it is immediately followed by
an interpretation much less satisfactory. Taylor seems to agree
with Green that ethics cannot be based on ‘physical’ facts, but
asks, “why may we not, . . . base our ethics in the main on
the observed facts of specifically human life?” Simply, we must
reply, because they are still observed facts, phenomena, which,
according to Green, presuppose the ethical consciousness which,
is in question. The critic has lapsed into the old fallacy of treat-
ing a metaphysical principle as a psychological phenomenon. It
is a mistake to suppose that Green objected only to reducing
consciousness to a series of ‘physical' as opposed to “psychical'
facts. The empirical sciences, for him, are those sciences which
deal with the world of objects by means of the generally recognized
categories of science, psychology being included among them.”
Professor Taylor sums up Green's argument in the following
language: “Subject and object are relative terms which mutually
imply one another, and cannot exist independently of each other;
matter and motion and the physical world are objects, ergo
matter is not subject, and conversely the subject which knows,
desires, etc., is not matter. From this result, which we have
no desire to impugn, he goes straight to the further conclusion
that each and every self or subject, not being a secondary product
of physical forces, cannot have come into being, and cannot have
a natural history.” Now, inasmuch as Green includes the
“psychical' (meaning thereby the phenomena of consciousness)
along with the ‘physical' world as an object of knowledge, we
must insert the word “psychical' into Mr. Taylor's second propo- /
sition so that it will read: ‘matter and motion and the physical,
and psychical worlds are objects.' Having done this, the final.
conclusion, in the passage quoted, loses its apparent character
of a non sequitur and becomes the only possible conclusion to be
drawn. The implication of Professor Taylor's language is that
Green did not take due account of the possibility of the self
1 My italics.
* The Problem of Conduct, p. 66.
* Cf. Bosanquet, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1901–02), p. 36 f.
* The Problem of Conduct, pp. 68 and 69. My italics.
58 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
being a product of psychical forces, whereas Green actually
excludes such a possibility along with his denial that conscious-
ness arises out of physical events. It is events, as such, which
cannot account for the consciousness of them. Whether we
choose to call those events physical or psychical is of no sig-
nificance.
“What evidence, then,” continues the critic, “does Green
supply that might lead us to affirm the underived character not
merely of consciousness, but of the ‘self’? As far as I compre-
hend his reasonings, all the evidence for this important transition
is offered by the consideration that a series of related events can-
not possibly become aware of itself as a related series.” Again,
the reader might be satisfied with this interpretation, did the
author not hasten to add the footnote: “This position itself
needs more qualification than Green gives it before it can be
accepted as psychologically true.” The author confesses that
he is unable, by introspection, to verify Green's contention.
“But of course,” he writes, “an opponent may say that this is
due to defective observation.” This seems an altogether singular
position for one who is familiar with Green's convincing argu-
ments against Hume's attempt to find such a ‘self’ by ‘looking
within his own mind.’ This confusion between the self as a
principle of unity in difference and the self as psychological and
objective is at the root of this and of much misunderstanding of
Green. The only reply to be made is the one made by D. G.
Ritchie to Bradley's characterization of the ‘timeless self” as a
“psychological monster.” The timeless self does not claim to
be a psychological self, and Green protests against such an inter-
pretation throughout his works. The timeless self is not the
psychological self (which is by hypothesis in time, since it may
be observed); but rather the knowing consciousness logically
implied in the possibility of psychology. Such a self is not
discovered by observation but by a rational disclosure of the
nature of observation; it is not a fact but the meaning of fact.
The next step in Mr. Taylor's argument is that relative
* The Problem of Conduct, p. 70.
* Loc. cit., note 2. My italics.
* Philosophical Review, III, 28, 29. Cf. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 113.
THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE SUBJECT. 59
permanency of the self is all that is required to account for
unity in diversity. “What is required,” he says, “in order that
the successive presentations A, B, C may all be recognized as
experiences of the one soul or self d, is not that d itself shall stand
in some mysterious way outside the time series, but simply that
alongside of the transition A, B, C there shall remain elements
in the experience of d which are the same at the moment when C
is being experienced as when A was being experienced.” Here
again the question is bound to arise—What can relative perma-
mency, or ‘change at a much less rapid rate’ mean without the
implicated consciousness for which such relative permanence is a
fact? No point can be carried against Green's metaphysics
by an appeal to psychological facts. They may be real and
very important facts, but they are not relevant to the discussion.
Our attention must be fixed on the question, ‘What is a fact?’,
not ‘What are the facts?’ The spiritual principle which
Green has called ‘consciousness’ is, by hypothesis, the meaning
of facts and events, and as such, it is not a fact or an event.”
Consciousness is a principle internal to events themselves by virtue.
of which they are constituted. Such a view of the nature of con-
sciousness no more destroys the reality of time than a declaration
of the non-spatial character of knowledge destroyed the reality
of space in the former argument. It does, however, destroy the
possibility of setting up time as an independent reality, or of
making time serve as a universal category. Mind is the creator
of time, not its creature. In whatever sense and degree con-
sciousness knows a series of natural events, in that sense and to
that degree it is not a member of the natural series.
1 The Problem of Conduct, p. 72.
* From this it follows without argument that the subject is not to be conceived
as that which existed prior to the beginning of events (Prolegomena, sec. 73), or
as that which exists as an unmoving point outside of the series of events, in relation
to which they move. Green's use of the expression “punctum stans’ is shown by
the above quotation to be borrowed from Locke in an attempt to meet Locke on
his own ground. It is not native to Green's thought. Cf. Bosanquet, Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society (1901–02), p. 39. “The first thing to remember seems
to me to be that it [the punctum stans argument] does not at all stand alone, but
that the main foundation of Green's argument is clearly and continually expressed
in other terms, (e. g., Prolegomena, sections 36 and 83) referring to the nature of a
true whole, and the progressive realization of such a whole in the human mind.”
6o INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
Green not only refuses to think of the self in spatial or temporal
terms, but, in a similar manner, he argues against applying the
categories of cause and effect to the self. Cause is a principle of
intelligibility whereby consciousness knows the world of objects.
It applies to objects, but not to knowledge of objects.” “A
proposition,” says Green, “which asserts divine causation for
any phenomenon is not exactly false, but turns out on strict
analysis to be unmeaning.” It is unmeaning because God,
when truly conceived as the spiritual principle in the world, is
in no sense interpolated as the supernatural into an otherwise
natural series of events. In exactly the same sense our conscious-
ness does not cause its object nor does the object cause Con-
sciousness.” Numerous attempts have been made to show that
consciousness is the effect of the interaction of organism and
environment. All such attempts, according to Green, take
certain relations between objects, “which only belong to them
as being what consciousness has made them, to explain the fact
of there being the consciousness to which they owe their existence.
. . . A product of consciousness—or, to speak more precisely,
a certain correlation of matter and organism belonging to the
“universe which arises in consciousness,' or to that objective
world to the existence of which it is admitted that a subject is
necessary—is thus employed to account for the origin of con-
sciousness.” Such a procedure, he continues, “can only remind
‘us of Baron Munchausen's feat in Swinging himself across a
stream by the sleeve of his own coat.”
But enough has now been said of Green's treatment of the
particular categories to prepare for his own positive conception
of consciousness. We have seen that consciousness is not an
object of knowledge in any ordinary sense. It is not a phe-
nomenon in any sense of the word. It is not, therefore, related
to objects as objects are related to each other. The categories
1. Cf. Prolegomena, sections I6 and I7.
* III, 264.
* “Intelligence, experience, knowledge, are no more a result of nature than
nature of them.” Prolegomena, sec. 36.
* I, 482.
* I, 482, 483.
THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE SUBJECT. 6I
of the empirical sciences do not apply to the source of the cate-
gories. “In vain,” says M. Bergson in a slightly different con-
text but in the same spirit, “we force the living into this or that
one of our molds. All the molds crack. They are too narrow,
above all too rigid, for what we try to put into them.” “The
greatest writer,” says Green, “must fall into confusions when he
brings under the conceptions of cause and substance the self-
conscious thought which is their source; and nothing else than
this is involved in Locke's avowed enterprise of knowing that
which renders knowledge possible as he might know any other
object.”
So far, however, our conception of consciousness and its rela-
tion to its object is negative. ‘Of what value,' it may be asked,
“is the proof for the reality of a mere principle which causes
nothing, is nowhere, and about which no natural history can be
written? Is it not a logical abstraction rather than real exist-
ence?’ Green raises the same objection and answers it in the
following language: “To the rejoinder that implication in the
conception of nature does not prove real existence, the answer
must be the question, What meaning has real existence, the anti-
thesis of illusion, except such as is equivalent to this concep-
tion?” This summary, perhaps almost curt, reply to his critics
should, by no means, lead us to suppose that Green was fully
content to stop with a purely negative or formal characterization
of the subject. His argument up to this point has been a means
to an end. Little by little he has forced his reader to abandon
the common habits of thinking about thought, or self-conscious-
ness, as if it were an object of knowledge, and has brought him
face to face with the subject of knowledge. By this method he
has cleared the ground for a more adequate notion of the self
as the subject related to the object through the unique, creative
function of knowledge—it knows the object.
The subject, so understood, although it can never be con-
ceived in the ordinary terms, is not left as a vague, mystic ab-
* Creative Evolution (translated by Mitchell, 1911), p. x. Cf. III, 228–229.
* I, Io9.
* I, I29.
62 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
straction about which nothing can be said." On the contrary,
it is arrived at by greater and greater determination through a
process of mediating dialectic in which the mechanical categories
are gradually shown to be inadequate and the nature of indi-
viduality correspondingly revealed. Reflection, in its initial
stages, showed that objects are individualized through the cate-
gories. We are now ready to understand the positive nature of
the subject, as the true individual, the true case of unity in
variety. Speaking of objects, Green writes: “Abstract the
many relations from the one thing, and there is nothing. They,
being many, determine or constitute its definite unity. It is
not the case that it first exists in its unity, and then is brought
into various relations. Without the relations it would not exist
at all. In like manner the one relation is a unity of the many
things. They, in their manifold being, make the one relation.
If these relations really exist, there is a real unity of the manifold,
a real multiplicity of that which is one. But a plurality of things
cannot of themselves unite in one relation, nor can a single thing
of itself bring itself into a multitude of relations. It is true, as
we have said, that the single things are nothing except as deter-
mined by relations which are the negation of their singleness, but
they do not therefore cease to be single things. Their common
being is not something into which their several existences disap-
pear. On the contrary, if they did not survive in their single-
ness, there could be no relation between them—nothing but a
blank featureless identity. There must, then, be something other
than the manifold things themselves, which combines them
without effacing their severalty. With such a combining agency
we are familiar as our intelligence.”
Every intelligent experience does present this typical unity,
combining the manifold things without effacing their severalty.
The one category, therefore, which seems appropriate to con-
sciousness is individuality. The same individuality which we
discovered as the essential nature of judgment, the simplest form
1 On this point Green is diametrically opposed to Bergson. Contrast the
formula of Spinoza—determinatio negatio est. Epist. L.
* Prolegomena, sections 28 and 29. See also section Io and Nettleship, Memoir,
III, lxxvi.
THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE SUBJECT. 63
of knowledge, also characterizes knowledge in all its com-
plexity as we find it in the experience of a long life. Indeed, the
whole of knowledge is but an expansion of the judgment. In
judgment we have a key to the nature of consciousness and also
to its relation to the object. As the terms of the judgment do not
exist independently, but only in and through the judgment;
so the objects of consciousness do not exist independently, but
only in and through consciousness.
By the term ‘consciousness' we here refer to the principle in
man of which no natural history can be given, viz., his capacity
or function of holding objects together in knowing them without
effacing their severalty. The objects, as we pointed out above,
exist only for consciousness and in that sense consciousness may
be said to create them. This view of Green's, however, is to be
sharply distinguished from that of Kant." For Kant, the under-
standing makes nature by forming that which is given as the
matter of experience. For Green, in whatever sense the under-
standing creates the form, it also creates the matter of experience.
At this point Green leans more heavily on Aristotle than on
Kant. Form and matter are not to be separated. We are not
free to speak of the understanding as a kind of artisan who works
up the material already at hand, for the material with which the
artisan works is already formed. The understanding makes
nature in making nature possible, but this function is not de-
pendent upon having at hand a primeval clay out of which to
mold its forms. To be is to be formed, to be related, or, in the
language of Greek philosophy, the object of sense does not exist;
to be is to be an “object of knowledge.” Kant's idea is that
without the understanding there would be a disordered world of
things by themselves; Green's idea is that without the under-
standing there would be no world at all.
“Everything is obscure in the idea of creation,” says Bergson,
“if we think of things which are created and a thing which
creates.” When we say that consciousness creates its object
we are prone to form an image of consciousness working upon
1 Prolegomena, sections II f.
* Creative Evolution, p. 248.
64 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
something—engaged, as it were, in its manufacture. But this
imagery is all wrong. The creation of which Green speaks
must be thought of in a very different way. The process of
creating the object has already been described as a process of
determination, leading from an abstract, relatively unformed
thing to the highly developed concrete individual thing. In this
sense creation is internal to the object. The object, in truth,
develops itself; since the relations of its individuality are not
imposed from without, but, developing from within, expose or
bring out the true nature of the object.
At other times Green speaks of the relation of consciousness
to the object as that of parent to child. Consciousness can find
its own life reproduced in its object. It knows, and, inasmuch
as objectivity exists in and through the function of knowledge,
consciousness may be said to be the father of the world. “But
though the world of nature is, in this sense, a world of man's
own creation, it is so in a different way from the world of art
and of philosophy. Thought is indeed its parent, but thought
in its primary stage fails to recognize it as its own, fails to trans-
fer to it its own attributes of universality, and identity in
difference. It sees outward objects merely in their diversity
and isolation. It seeks to penetrate nature by endless dichotomy,
glorying in that dissection of unity which is the abdication of
its own prerogative.”
But whatever metaphor Green uses, the essential character
of the self as a true unity in plurality and plurality in unity
is what he is most concerned to show. Although the ordinary
terms appropriate to the object of knowledge do not apply to
the subject of knowledge, the self, or subject, is, nevertheless,
like the object in that it unites universality and particularity in
individuality.” Along with the similarity, however, there is this
difference. The individuality of the object is not for itself, but
only for the subject who individualizes it in knowing it, while
the subject is an individual for itself. The subject, by this
self-returning activity, does actually know itself, not, to be sure,
1 III, 21–22. Cf. Prolegomena, sections Io, II f.
* Cf. Seth, Man's Place in the Cosmos (1897), pp. 163–164. “The thing and
its qualities is a mere analogue of the self as a many in one.”
THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE SUBJECT. 65
under the forms of space, time, causality, and the like, but as a
unity in variety. It knows itself not as its own object, but as the
necessary correlate of the fact that it has an object. It is driven
home to itself from its contact with objectivity, and then for the
first time knows itself as that above all which made its first
experience possible. It sees itself not as an object, but as a
creative individual subject. This view is, of course, by no
means original with Green. Hegel has made such language
famous when describing the subject." He defines individuality
as “the reflection-into-self of the specific characters of uni-
versality and particularity.” In Green's language we call the
subject a spiritual principle because “we are warranted in
thinking of it as a self-distinguishing consciousness.” “There
is nothing ‘für sich bestehend' but thought itself.”
Green's critical work, says Professor Andrew Seth Pringle-
Pattison, has a “victorious” and “conclusive character, “but
as regards the nature of the Self or Spiritual Principle which is,
in his hands, the instrument of victory, the candid reader of
Green is forced to admit that almost everything is left vague.”
It may readily be admitted that there is a kind of vagueness
about Green's account, as there must be about any account, of a
principle which is shown to be beyond the usual methods of
thought. The epitome of Green's attempt to define the self
is revealed in the question: “What is that which retains a
plurality in its plurality, and yet unifies it through relation, but
consciousness?” It is that unity in which diversity is immanent;
it is the true harmony of the universal and the particular, i. e.,
the individual. Whatever vagueness there is in such an account
of consciousness can be avoided only by a return to the plane of
mechanism, where, waiving all ultimate questions, we abandon
the hope of metaphysic. But if we would inquire into the nature
of the subject we must use language applicable to its unique
1 “The idea is truth in itself and for itself.” Logic (Wallace), section 213.
* Ibid., section I63.
* Prolegomena, section 54.
* II, II, note I. Cf. II, 2II.
* Hegelianism and Personality (1887), p. 4.
* II, I6.
66 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
character. Leaving the explanation of mechanism, we must go
on to a conception of consciousness as in some sense the source
of the mechanical relations. To him who can believe in the
reality of those things only which his eyes have seen and his
hands have handled, Green's talk of ‘spiritual principles’ will
continue to be enigmatical. To such a one, consciousness must
be put some place, or set in time, before it can claim reality; to
say that consciousness is an individual, or a unity in plurality
or a principle, is, so he thinks, to “multiply words without
knowledge.' But Green offers no concessions to such perverse
scepticism. Like a teacher of old, when men say of consciousness,
‘Lo, here, or Lo, there,' Green warns us to believe them not;
if we would find consciousness we must seek it in the way of
the spirit."
1. Cf. Mark, 13, 2I.
CHAPTER V.
GOD: THE COMPLETE INDIVIDUAL.
OUR theory of consciousness is not complete until we have
seen not only what consciousness is, but what it is to be. As
objects have been found to exhibit different degrees of concrete-
ness or individuality, so there are degrees of individuality in the
subject. Although the simplest recognition of matters of fact
is infinitely removed from bare particularity, consciousness, in
its early stages, is relatively nebulous and undetermined. But
as the object of knowledge points beyond itself to a complete
system of nature, so the finite subject finds its significance by
reference to a total situation beyond its limitations. We have
seen that the object becomes more and more complete through
successive stages of definition; we have yet to trace the course of
the finite subject through a similar development. The progress
in each case is toward an ideal completion of individuality, but
there is this fundamental difference: The ideal system of nature
in which the object finds its complete definition exists not for
the actual object of nature, but for man who conceives such a
system; whereas, the ideally complete subject exists for the
actual subject as his own self-conscious ideal.
The individuality which I discover in my own experience is,
after all, but a fragment. I am limited on all sides. Not only
do I often miss the truth, but I always fall short of it; and yet I
am not limited by an absolute boundary as an animal is con-
fined in a cage. The limitation of human knowledge, which no
one disputes and which requires no proof, is the limitation inher-
ent in the nature of knowledge. Knowledge, as Green has so
frequently suggested, has to do with a situation in which there
is a certain disparity between that which is and that which is
not yet. The guiding thread in the study of an object is the
ideal of a complete account of the object in its total relation.
It is the nature of an ideal to be beyond the present grasp, and
67
68 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
yet the ideal, as a functional part of experience, is equally present
in experience with that which is already grasped. There is a
sense, therefore, in which knowledge sets its own limits. It sets
a goal; approximates it, only to set another, and so on endlessly.
Thus, although our knowledge is certainly finite, the limits are
not fixed or imposed from without, but are incidental to the
internal development of knowledge and are eternally being over-
come. The finite mind, in knowing, exhibits itself as potentially
infinite through this very process of setting up a limit and then
of passing beyond its own limit. Our knowledge is never quite
complete, but always finds its completion in a future judgment
referring to that which lies beyond the present insight, or, in
other words, to reality as a whole. No philosophy can ignore
this forward-pointing characteristic of knowledge; since reality
will never be adequately expressed in terms of finitude, and since
what lies beyond our present grasp is, nevertheless, a very
important aspect of the world and must be reckoned with. In
what sense it is real and what relation it sustains with finite
experience constitutes a fundamental problem for all types of
metaphysical theory. Green faces this problem with confidence,
although with great caution.
It is first necessary to remember that all predication is based
upon an assumption that there is a nature of things or a basal
reality by reference to which all judgments get their meaning,
and through which truth is distinguished from falsehood. What
the reality beyond the present is, is not now in question. “The
complete determination of an event,” writes Green, “it may be
impossible for our intelligence to arrive at. There may always
remain unascertained conditions which may render the relation
between an appearance and such conditions of it as we know,
liable to change. But that there is an unalterable order of rela-
tions, . . . is the presupposition of all our enquiry into the
real nature of appearances.”
We are justified in assuming the existence of such an objective
totality” by reference to which our knowledge acquires validity
1 Prolegomena, sec. 26. See also sec. 70.
* Mr. A. J. Balfour doubts this statement. Cf. Mind, IX, 83.
GOD: THE COMPLETE INDIVIDUAL. 69
because the scepticism which would deny its existence destroys
itself in the same breath by assuming some such reality as the
basis for its denial. Any conclusion based on the assumption
that there is such a dependable system of relations will not,
therefore, be weakened by the suggestion that “the validity of
our conclusion, upon our own showing, depends upon there really
being such an order of nature as our quest of knowledge supposes
there to be, which remains unproven.” For, Green continues,
“as the sceptic in order to give his language a meaning, must
necessarily make the same supposition—as he can give no
meaning to reality but the one explained—his suggestion that
there really may not be such an order of nature is one that con-
veys nothing at all.”
Inasmuch as all thought proceeds on the assumption of the
verifiability of its claims, those who would think are compelled
to assume also the reality of a total objective situation as a basis
for such a verification. To deny the existence of such a universe
is to affirm it. It is also necessary to believe that the process
of verification of tomorrow will be similar to the one of today.
No body of knowledge could exist unless nature is in some sense
uniform and continuous. On these considerations, Green rests
his conclusion that there must be some kind of an objective
criterion of judgment, a reality which gives meaning to the claim
of validity.
This reality, however, to which our particular judgments are
referred may be conceived in at least two very different ways.
On the one hand, it may be conceived as a fixed reality outside
of thought, to which our ideas correspond more or less accurately.
Green unconditionally rejected this view.” Our ideas are in no
sense copies of an alien reality; for a moment's reflection shows
that ideas are included within reality. “The work of the mind is
real,” he tells us. If truth is to be defined as ‘the agreement
of thought with its object,” the definition must be reinterpreted.
It can no longer take shelter behind a naïve assumption that
thought may somehow be superimposed upon its object and found
1 Prolegomena, sec. 26.
* Cf. Chapter II.
7o INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
to match point by point. Another serious objection to this view
is that reality is looked upon as a fixed quantum which admits of
no essential change. Everything is there, once for all, in a
static, substantial form. The dice are loaded so that what-
ever happens must take place along prečstablished lines: there
is no room for actual change or freedom.
On the other hand, reality may be looked upon as a total
concatenation, coherent as human experience is coherent, but
in its totality beyond the grasp of the finite mind. According
to such a theory, truth may be said to depend upon the degree of
individuality which any experience has attained, i. e., upon the
degree to which the experience has transcended its fragmentary
character and has become a systematization of otherwise abstract
particulars. This is Green's conception of the nature of reality
and truth. “Coherence . . . ,” he writes, “is only predicable
of a system of relations, not felt but conceived; while incoherence
arises from the attempt of an imperfect intelligence to think an
object under relations which cannot ultimately be held together
in thought.” This theory maintains that the reality which lies
beyond our present apprehension is of a piece with the reality
which I know. All possible experience must somehow be uni-
form with that already attained. The uniformity need not,
however, be repetition; indeed it is never repetition, but there
must be a certain consistency of relations throughout the whole.
The relations themselves must be different, but they are still the
same in being relations. The relations existing for the individual
knower in the objective order are a guarantee of similar relations
in the universe beyond his private experience. “The uniformity
of nature,” says Green, “does not mean that its constituents are
everywhere the same, but that they are everywhere related;
not that ‘the thing which has been is that which shall be,” but
that whatever occurs is determined by relation to all that has
occurred, and contributes to determine all that will occur.”
The rational character of my world would be denied by a proof
of the irrationality of the universe. Unless the individuality
* I, 155.
* Prolegomena, sec. 33. Cf. sec. 73.
GOD: THE COMPLETE INDIVIDUAL. 71
discoverable in finite experience is characteristic of the world as
Y a whole, “we have asserted the unity of the world of our experi-
ence only to transfer that world to a larger chaos.”
The first type of philosophy looks upon reality as a permanent
substance more or less disconnected with knowledge; the second
type looks upon it as a permanent system of relations, organically
and vitally connected with knowledge. In spite of the external
resemblance of the two accounts of objective reality there is
really a very fundamental difference. In both cases the element
of permanence is strongly emphasized, but in the first case the
permanence is incompatable with change, in the second, change
is a necessary and organic factor in the conception. According
to the first notion, reality is a given object to which our ideas
may be said to correspond. The idea is always external to
reality and has nothing to do with its constitution. Change can
be predicated, not of reality, but only of our thoughts concerning
it. Reality, therefore, does not change; change is illusion,
resulting from the false or incomplete representative character
of our ideas. The second conception of being or reality, how-
ever, is very different. In it we talk no more of substances, but
of relations. Now a world of relations is above everything else
a world of meanings, or of judgments, i. e., an intelligible world.
When we return to Green's discussion of relations we recall
that relations are not mere connecting links between substances,
but that relations constitute the objective world of fact to its
very core. There is nothing left over when relations are taken
away. The ‘facts,’ therefore, of Green's system are spiritual
or meaningful through and through, and, what is still more
important, the facts or relations are ‘capable of infinitely numer-
ous other determinations as they are brought into new relations.”
With these familiar doctrines kept well in mind we are at once
able to see the tremendous difference between a reality defined
in terms of things and substances and a reality defined in terms
of meanings and relations. There is no such a thing in Green's
philosophy as a fixed or static meaning, just as there is no such
a thing as a complete and axiomatic judgment. When, therefore,
1 Prolegomena, Sec. 39.
72 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
reality is defined as a permanent system of relations the perma-
nent has no reference to a static reality, immobile and change-
less, but permanent in just the same sense that any truth is
permanent in spite of the fact that it is “capable of infinitely
numerous other determinations.'
In view of the fact that the problem of change and develop-
ment in Green's philosophy will later call for a somewhat more
extended treatment, the matter may be allowed to rest for the
present. It is to be noticed, however, that Green's attempt to
define the nature of reality as a whole is put in the same terms
which he used to describe the nature of each phase of experience
with which he has dealt. Firmly convinced that finite experi-
ence is a systematic or relational whole, he does not hesitate to
characterize the world of possible experience beyond the present
grasp of a finite mind, as also a world of relations, continuous with
the cosmos of finite experience; not necessarily intelligible under
the exact forms which the finite mind now uses, but necessarily
intelligible, i. e., necessarily related to the present and char-
acterized internally by relations. All experiences, actual or
possible—“the experience of a thousand years ago and the
experience of today, the experience which I have here and that
which I might have in any other region of space,”—must some-
how form a single system." -
Having thus satisfied himself that there is an objective system
of relations, Green proceeds to draw the conclusion that such a
system implies a spiritual principle as the complete subject of
that total system of objects. “The inference from nature,” he
writes, “to a being neither in time nor contingent but self-
dependent and eternal, . . . is valid because the conception of
nature, of a world to be known, already implies such a being.”
It will be observed that Green's argument for the existence of
this self-dependent being is identical with the argument by which
he proved the spiritual principle in knowledge. In neither case
1 Prolegomena, sec. 32.
* I, I29. See also Prolegomena, sections 19 f. and 69. At this stage in the
discussion it is probably unnecessary to remind the reader that the implication of
which Green speaks is never a mere verbal or associational connection. God is
implied in nature just as subject in general is implied in objectivity. Cf. Chap. III.
GOD: THE COMPLETE INDIVIDUAL. 73
is the appeal made to an immediate or intuitive apprehension,
but the spiritual principle is said to be implied in the natural or
objective order. The spiritual is discovered in the natural."
He has no hesitancy in arguing from a permanent system of
relations to the existence of a spiritual principle, which he con-
sistently calls God, implied in those relations. “That God is,”
he says, “it [human reason] entitles us to say with the same
certainty as that the world is or that we ourselves are. What he
is, it does not indeed enable us to say in the same way in which
we make propositions about matters of fact.”
It is peculiarly unsatisfying to stop with the bare assertion,
or proof, of God's existence, if this is to rest as the mere asser-
tion of the undefined. In the language of Edward Caird:
“There is a fundamental incoherence in a view which, though
treating the infinite as a positive reality, and, indeed, as the
reality that underlies all other realities, yet reduces it to that of
which nothing can be said, except that it is.” The human mind
demands more than this. We want to know what relations we,
as finite beings, have with this infinite being, God. What
difference does it make to me that God exists if I must remain
forever ignorant of his nature and his relation to us? We are
less concerned today with the proof that God exists, just as we
are less concerned with the proof that the human self exists, and
more concerned with the character of God and the self. To
prove the existence of anything is at best a very meagre result
except in so far as it leads on to a deeper insight. According to
Green's own theory ‘everything exists’ of which we speak, the
* It may also be noticed that Green's proof for the existence of the spiritual
principle in nature is not the cosmological proof for the existence of God. The
spiritual principle (God) is no more the cause of the objective order as a whole
than consciousness is the cause of its object. In each case the two are distin-
guishable but inseparable features of a single reality. “We contradict ourselves,”
he says, “if we say that there was first a chaos and then came to be an order; for
the ‘first’ and ‘then’ imply already an order of time, which is only possible through
an action not in time.” (Prolegomena, sec. 66.) Cf. Bergson, Creative Evolution,
p. 220 ft. Furthermore, Green is not giving the ontological proof. He does not
argue from the idea of a spiritual principle to its existence; but from the existence
of nature to a spiritual principle through which nature is possible.
* III, 268. Cf. also Prolegomena, sec. 51.
* The Evolution of Religion, Vol. I, p. Io9.
74 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
important thing being to show how it exists or in what its exist-
ence consists. Perhaps Green expended a disproportionate
amount of energy in showing that God is, to the neglect of a
constructive attempt to tell us what he is," but fortunately he
has not left us wholly ignorant of his conception of God's nature.
His most significant attempt to tell us what God is is put in
the form of an analogy. The spiritual principle in nature is,
he says, “analogous to that of our understanding.” It may, at
first thought, seem rather unsatisfactory to rest such a far reach-
ing conception on an analogy. The analogy, however, is not an
ordinary one, and is not offered as a proof of God's existence,
nor as a complete expression of his nature, but as an assistance
to the mind in its attempt to conceive him. Like all analogies,
this one doubtless has its limitations, and is based on differences
as well as similarities.” The differences between God and man
are just as significant for Green's theory as are the similarities.
The analogy is drawn between man, the as yet incomplete,
partially self-determined individual, and God, the complete,
wholly self-determined individual.
God is like man in being the subject rather than an object of
knowledge. He is not a thing, an event, a cause; by searching
he cannot be found out. “You cannot know him,” writes
Green, “as you know a particular fact related to you, but neither
can you so know yourself.” Our knowledge of both man and
God is gained by inference; the One by reflection on the nature
of knowledge; the other by reflection on the universal system of
relations through which knowledge is possible. Green's attempts
to describe God as a spiritual principle implied in nature are
stated in terms identical with those which he used in describing
the spiritual principle in man. The arguments by which these
conclusions are reached are also exactly alike point by point.
In each case, the subjective principle is discovered as the impli-
cation of an objective order. It is, as it were, hidden from us,
buried within the objective order, and comes to light only after
1. Cf. Edw. Caird's criticism, Mind, O. S., VIII, 560 ff. Also John Watson,
Philosophical Review, XVIII, IóI.
2 Cf. III, 225.
8 III. 272.
GOD: THE COMPLETE INDIVIDUAL. 75
the labor of sober reflection. Green's language in describing the
spiritual principle in nature will clearly reveal the sense in which
God is like man. He says: “By calling the principle not natural
we mean that it is neither included among the phenomena which
through its presence to them form a nature, nor consists in their
series, nor is itself determined by any of the relations which it
constitutes among them. In saying more than this of it we must
be careful not to fall into confusion. We are most safe in calling
it spiritual, because, for reasons given, we are warranted in
thinking of it as a self-distinguishing consciousness.” It is
misleading, he continues, to call it supernatural; “for we suggest
a relation between it and nature of a kind which has really no
place except within nature, as a relation of phenomenon to
phenomenon. We convey the notion that it is above or beyond
or before nature, that it is a cause of which nature is the effect,
a substance of which the changing modes constitute nature;
while in truth all the relations so expressed are relations which,
indeed, but for the non-natural self-conscious subject would not
exist, but which are not predicable of it.” And he sums the
whole matter up by declaring that “we are entitled to say,
positively, that it [i. e., the spiritual principle in nature] is a
self-distinguishing consciousness;” and, “negatively, that the
relations by which, through its action, phenomena are deter-
mined are . . . not relations by which it is itself determined.”
So far Green treats God as “identical in principle” with the
self-conscious human individual; but here the similarity ceases
and difference begins. No one recognizes more fully than does
Green the great differences between God and man. Man is
entangled by the phenomenal order from which he is “evermore
working himself free” in his struggle to realize the divinity within
him and to grasp life's meaning in its entirety. God, on the
other hand, is that ideal meaning itself. He is, therefore, all
that it is possible for man to become. But this conception of
God as the completion of the finite individual is a difficult one
to express. Green resorts, at this point, to another figure of
1 Prolegomena, sec. 54.
* Prolegomena, sec. 52.
76 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
speech. We can know what this spiritual principle is only
“through its so far acting in us as to enable us, however partially
and interruptedly, to have knowledge of a world or an intelligent
experience.” Elsewhere he tells us that God makes the animal
organism “the vehicle” of his “communication” to man,” and
that “God gradually reproduces himself in us.”
The meaning of all these figures is that God is the ideal or
possible self. Man, though the true type of individual, at least
in so far as he ‘partakes of self-consciousness,' is, nevertheless
but the promise of a complete synthesis of life's variety. “There
is but one real world,” says Green, “the intelligible, which,
however, is an actuality, of which to us sense is the potentiality.”
This gap between the potential and the actual is what gives scope
for the growth of knowledge, which is but another name for the
‘process of actualization' under consideration. But Green
believes that a “process of actualization presupposes a complete
actuality which is at once its beginning and its end.” God is
the ideal completion of the meaning of the finite self.
In this conception we see the basis for Green's statement that
we can know what God is only “piecemeal” and never adequately.
It is the nature of an ideal to be beyond the present grasp, and
if it is to remain an ideal it must remain beyond the grasp. There
is this fundamental difference, however, between Green's con-
tention that God in his completeness is forever unknown to the
finite mind and the theory, as formulated by Spencer, that God
is the unknowable. There is a sense in which God is unknowable,
1 Prolegomena, sec. 51.
* Prolegomena, sec. 67.
* Prolegomena, sec. 7I. The means which God uses of communicating himself
to man are the gradual means of a rational progress in understanding the world.
The revelation is no miraculous telling of special secrets as the result of divination
or mystery, but the revelation of our coming to know the reality about us. Fore-
most among the instruments of communication Green names institutions. He
treats an institution much as Hegel does, as “an elementary effort after a regu-
lation of life.” (Prolegomena sec. 205.) Social and political institutions are the
outward expression of the life of reason in which each rational self-consciousness
partakes in some degree. As we become more and more law abiding or well
regulated in life, we approach nearer and nearer to a complete apprehension of
God's nature. It is thus that he “communicates himself to us.”
4 III, 84.
5 III, 85.
GOD: THE COMPLETE INDIVIDUAL. 77
says Edward Caird, “but to say that we cannot know God to
perfection, is only to say that we cannot know everything; while
to say that we cannot know Him at all is to say that we can know
nothing. We cannot know God to perfection, because we cannot,
know the world or ourselves to perfection; but all our knowledge
is based on the presence of these three inseparable elements of
consciousness within us, and all our knowledge is therefore a part.
of the knowledge of God. It is true that, just because he is the
light of all our seeing, he can never be completely seen; for the
return we make on the ultimate presupposition of our being can
never be a final return.” It is in just this sense that Green
holds that God is unknowable. To grasp God in his fullness
would be to have achieved an ideal once for all, and, therefore,
to have destroyed God and the ideal.
That both the total system of nature and the subject through
which such a system is possible are ideal, i. e., never actually
realized in human experience, is, therefore, no reason for denying
their existence. They exist as the ideal of a self-conscious
being. Such an ideal is at the same time the highest reality
because it is bound up with experience at every point. It is a
characteristic feature of experience, indispensable to its very
existence. “There may probably at first seem to be something
offensive,” says Green, “in the doctrine that the “possible self,’
the realization of which is the source of all action that can
properly be called moral or immoral, is God, and that in our.
identity with it lies the true unity with God. Before it is re-
jected, however, let it be understood. On a first hearing it may
seem to imply that God does not actually exist at all, but is a
mere name for an empty ideal of what each of us would like to
become. This is a misapprehension, which a better under-
standing of the relation between actual and possible will remove.”
It requires both the actual and the possible to make up a
self conscious experience. Even in the case of the object, indeed,
as we noticed in Chapter II, its totality is ‘not there all at once.”
An object is more than a present, limited actuality; it is a poten-
1 The Evolution of Religion, Vol. I, 139–140.
* III, 224.
g
78 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
tiality of the whole universe. It reaches out beyond the ‘this’
and the ‘now’ to find its final self in the completion of meaning
to which it is determined through successive judgments. But
if it is necessary to give an account of the object partly in terms
of that which it is not yet, how much more clearly is this essen-
tial in the case of the subject. The ideal object exists for the
conscious subject, but the subject is capable of setting its own
ideal. The possible object and the possible subject are, there-
fore, real in the only truly consistent meaning of that word. To
be real is to have “qualities and relations of its own.” If, then,
the ideal is so far related that it is indispensable to the simplest
experience of objects, by what right do we suppose that it is not
real? The statement that the ideal is not real, acquires its force,
and its danger, from an equivocal use of the word real. At one
time it is used as the opposite of unreal, and at another as a
synonym for actual as opposed to possible. The first use has
been shown above to be absolutely indefensible;' the second
should be abandoned because it is easily confused with the first.
If we mean that the ideal is not realized, or actualized, in finite
experience we are merely explicating the meaning of the word. It
is not only not achieved, but by its very nature it will never be
achieved.
“To say then,” says Green, “that God is the final cause of
the moral life, the ideal self which no one, as a moral agent, is,
but which everyone, as such an agent, is however blindly seeking
to become, is not to make him unreal. It is, however (and this
may seem at once more presumptuous and less reasonable), in a
certain sense to identify him with man; and that not with an
abstract or collective humanity but with the individual man.”
This highly significant quotation indicates a very important
element in Green's conception of God, and at the same time
more fully justifies his use of the analogy between God and man.
God is like man in being strictly an individual. As man in knowing
combines his several experiences into one experience without
effacing their severalty, so God is the unifying principle in nature
which unites but at the same time differentiates the variety of
1 Pp. 26 f.
* III, 225.
GOD: THE COMPLETE INDIVIDUAL. 79
nature. In the same sense that thought creates its object, God
creates the system of objects, i.e., by making the system possible.
All idealistic philosophies have been frequently charged with
neglecting the claims of life's variety in favor of its unity. Green,
however, has, in reality, forestalled such criticism in his treat-
ment of the individual and in identifying God “with the indi-
vidual man.” If it is particularity, abstract, and void of uni-
versal relations, which the objectors are desirous of saving from
Green's conclusion, it is altogether too late to protest when a
discussion of God is reached. The mere particular not only
does not exist in the infinite, but it does not exist in the finite.
The criticism is, therefore, beside the mark; for the mere par-
ticular exists nowhere, in heaven or earth. If, on the other
hand, the critics fear that the individual is lost in the infinite,
we have but to recall Green's definition of the real as that which
has “qualities and relations of its own” to be convinced that
such fears are without foundation. God is not said to be an
ideal universal in which all particularity is swallowed up, but an
ideal individual in which particularity and universality are
united." How can any individual thing which has “qualities
and relations of its own” become less real or in danger of losing
its reality altogether by the extension or intension of those
qualities or relations through, or in, an ideally complete indi-
viduality?
Such criticism appears to tell against Green's philosophy for
those only who persist in thinking of definition as a kind of
abstraction; in a word, for those who still remain enslaved by the
conceptions of formal logic. The exposition of Green's position
on this point has already been given in Chapter II. There it was
pointed out that for him a thing does not become less but more
real as it is determined; the undetermined, being the only non-
existent. Far from being the undetermined, Green holds that
God is the highest reality and, therefore, the most, or even the
completely determined being. It is the great virtue of the
philosophy of individuality that it is peculiarly capable of re-
taining the many and the one in their truth; for it never separates
1 See Green's discussion of Berkeley's conception of God as a piéyo. §§ov. I, 157 ff.
z
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-2.-
8O INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
'them. As it does not begin its speculation with the abstract
particular, so it never ends with the abstract universal. Some
kind of a unity in variety is the only solution which can satisfy
the two fundamental demands of thought; but if the initial
separation is once made between the particular and the uni-
versal, there can be no ultimately satisfactory synthesis. For
through the procedure imposed by the method which has been
adopted, thought is distorted and falsified, and reality is alienated
at the very threshold of speculation. The sane and fundamental
demand for a genuine rationalization of reality is made impossible
of satisfaction by an arbitrary and abstract procedure of thought.
The most hopeful way, therefore, is found in the way of indi-
viduality which Green has chosen.
“Logically,” says Dewey, “all ultimates are alike; the differ-
ence between the Unconscious of von Hartmann, the Unknowable
of Spencer, the Will of Schopenhauer, and the Thought or Self-
consciousness of some of the Neo-Hegelians is not an intellectually
definable difference.” But surely this is a most surprising
statement. It is of course possible to use the term Thought or
Self-consciousness without realizing what this principle involves;
but as used by Green the term ‘Self-consciousness’ is radically
different from the other ultimates with which it is here so
strangely classed. Indeed, there is all the difference which
obtains between substance and subject or between mechanism
and teleology.” If the ultimate is defined or conceived in terms
of the abstract or merely logical universal, we have a very different
‘sort of ultimate from one conceived as an individual. The one
is the absolutely undetermined and indeterminable, and there-
fore, according to Green, the unreal; the other is the completely
determined and ultimate reality. The one is the summum genus
of the formal logicians; the other, unity in variety typified in
the concrete judgment. One depends on subsumption under
classes; the other on articulation by relation. The one tends to
* John Dewey, Philosophical Review, XIX, p. 188.
* I do not wish to raise the question of the interpretation of the several ulti-
Imates mentioned, but merely to deny that “all ultimates are alike,' and to suggest
the essential difference between Green's ‘Self-consciousness’ which is individual
and other ultimates which are merely universal.
GOD: THE COMPLETE INDIVIDUAL. 8I
M
obliterate distinctions; the other to preserve them. The one
essentially denies multiplicity and development; the other affirms
and interprets them. The one is reached by leaving out attri-
butes; the other, by increasing determination. The one repre-
sents the extinction of the individual life and value; the other,
their ideal completion. Such is the difference between the
concrete individual of Green's system and the abstract universal
of some others. It is comparatively easy to reach a conclusion
in philosophy by ignoring a half of thought's demands. To
take our stand for the ultimate unity or the ultimate variety of
life is to solve too easily the gravest of philosophical problems.
Green's mind could not rest after such a meagre sabbath day's
journey but was compelled to press on to that goal of philo-
sophical reflection—the interpretation of the paradox of the
one and the many. This is an ancient and ever recurring demand
of the human spirit which will not be thrust lightly aside by
nominalism on the one hand, or realism on the other.
In evaluating any system of philosophy today the most per-
sistent question is “How does it square with the doctrine and
method of evolution?” To test the truth of any theory it is
necessary to see whether the theory takes due account of change
and leaves room for real development or whether it attempts to
define reality in static terms. Such a test, although it may
appear somewhat artificial when applied to theories developed
before men were stirred by the new conception of change and
development which grew out of the Darwinian revolution in
biology, cannot be out of place when dealing with a philosophy
written so recently as that of Green. Green, who was in the
very midst of the controversies aroused by the new theories,
was, perhaps, the most discriminating and independent philo-
sophical writer of the time. He was certainly the most im-
portant of those who were convinced of the essential limitations
of the Darwinian hypothesis when raised to the rank of a phi-
losophy. His well known opposition to the evolutionary phi-
losophers of his day, Spencer in particular, has led many serious
students to discredit Green's philosophy without further exami-
nation on the ground that it is an antiquated semi-theological
82 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
system which has very little significance for the modern mind.
Now, however, that Spencer's theories are no longer accepted
without qualification in evolutionary philosophy, it is profitable
to turn to the philosophy of his most discerning contemporary
and philosophical opponent. What was Green's attitude
toward evolution, and in what sense, if any, does his own phi-
losophy provide a basis for genuine change or growth?
Beginning with the examination of the object, and proceeding
through a consideration of the spiritual principle in man and
nature, Green has never lost sight of process. He shows, first,
that no object exists in isolation, but that it is the very essence
of the object to be related to other objects in a common world.
We make a mistake, however, if we suppose that the relations
of an object are so simple that they can be summed up in a
definition, or so few that they can be completely tabulated and
quantified. To be defined is the very soul of a real object,
yet an object is always infinitely more than a given definition;
in Green's language “it is capable of infinitely numerous other
determinations.” Here is surely room for process or growth
of some kind, and it is just at this point that his theory of objec-
tivity is seen to have a direct bearing on evolution. According
to the old formal logic, the object falls within a class, that class
within a higher class, and so on until the highest class or genus
is reached. The highest genus, since it includes everything else
within it, is the least differentiated and the most abstract; while
the individual object is thought of as there in a fixed or given
reality, impaled forever by a name. Green reverses all this:
in his philosophy no object is complete or finally made, but it is,
in the true sense of the word, in the making. The object is
universal through relations which are inexhaustible and infinite
so that it is never quite complete. Green's abandonment of
formal logic should satisfy the most radical, but he does not
stop here. He postulates a total system of nature as a basis
for change. To be sure, this system is represented as an ideal
* Cf. Bergson's criticism of Spencer. Creative Evolution, pp. 188 and 363 ff.;
also J. Royce, Herbert Spencer, An Estimate and Review; also J. T. Merz, A History
of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century, Vol. III, p. 51.
* III, 56.
GOD: THE COMPLETE INDIVIDUAL. 83
system, but it is, nevertheless, said to be a “permanent system.”
This reveals a note of paradox. The question at once arises,
‘How shall we harmonize the infinite development of the object
with a permanent system of objects?’ “For reason,” Green
writes “(and, except for reason, there is no nature at all),
nature is a system of becoming, which rests on unchangeable
conditions.”
Is it possible to meet this dilemma without denying the reality
either of the permanence or of the change? This really consti-
tutes the problem of modern philosophy. If the human mind
could rest satisfied with either horn of the dilemma, the problem
would have been solved long before our day and philosophers
would not now be interested in it. As it is, every philosophy
which pretends to rise above the plane of unreflective tradition
must cope with the problem anew. Does Green's system leave
room for real change or is change after all lost in permanence?
In the language of Bosanquet: “How can progress be all included
in, and belong to a timeless reality?”
It is impossible to answer such questions except by reference
to a subject for whom these relations exist. “It is,” says Green,
“the consciousness of possibilities in ourselves, unrealized but
constantly in process of realization, that alone enables us to
read the idea of development into what we observe of natural
life, and to conceive that there must be such a thing as a plan
of the world.” The very condition of there being such a world,
ordered in intelligible ways, is the consciousness of that world.
If we would understand Green's notion of development, there-
fore, we must pass from the world of objects to the world of
subjects. The relation of objects to each other in experience,
whether that relation be one of development or of simple exist-
ence, implies a principle related to the series as knower to known,
but not itself knowable in serial or quasi-serial forms. There is
a unity in this experience taken as a whole; but it is not another
unit over and above the unitary objects which it knows. This
is the true individual; for in consciousness the many and the one
* II, 74 and 75. Cf. Prolegomena, sec. 18.
* The Value and Destiny of the Individual (1913), p. 71.
* Prolegomena, sec. 186.
84 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
are intimately and organically related so that the many are truly
many in one. Human consciousness, indeed, like the object, is
incomplete. It is, however, growing more and more complete;
and, in addition to the mere fact of growth or development, it is
capable of setting or apprehending its own completion as its goal
of development. The goal of human struggle may be called
indifferently the possible self, or God. Like the ideal object which
is a complete and permanent system of nature, God may be
said to be the complete self, the eternal self-consciousness,
through which complete nature is possible.
Such is Green's account of the individual. Individuality is
discoverable in the remotest germ or fragment of knowledge;
there is no abstract particular. On the other hand, reality as a
whole is also an individual; there is no abstract universal. The
individuality of the object is the same in kind as the individuality
of a system of nature; and the individuality of the simplest act
of knowledge is the individuality of an eternal and complete
consciousness. What sort of evolution does such a plan allow?
In the first place, it may be worth while to point out that for
Green evolution cannot be defined in terms of motion in space.
Change of place is not development. This statement may
seem so obvious that there is danger of forgetting that attempts
have been made to define evolution by just this kind of change.
Spencer believes that the problem of philosophy is to find “the
law of the continuous redistribution of matter and motion,” and
defines evolution as “an integration of matter and dissipation of
motion.” Nevertheless, it has now become a commonplace
that no amount of rearrangement of things in space can really
be a process of evolution.”
Secondly, change of time is not development. This statement
is perhaps less obviously true, but none the less really so. We
get into the habit of thinking that it is the essential characteristic
of evolution to consume time. Green warns us against an
uncritical acceptance of this belief. “We must be on our guard,”
he says, “against lapsing into the notion that a process ad
1 First Principles, sec. 92.
* First Principles, sec. 97.
* Cf. Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 363 ff.
GOD: THE COMPLETE INDIVIDUAL. 85
%
infinitum, a process not relative to an end, can be a process of
development at all.” Simple duration is probably a sine qua
non of any real development, but development itself cannot be
wholly reduced to duration. Even space could be shown to be
an indispensable condition of all development since it is actually
in a space-time world that our term ‘development' has any
significance. But, on the other hand, development is infinitely
more than any mere shifting in space or time. It must be
change toward a more valuable or higher state. There is an
element of valuation, therefore, underlying all true development,
an element which is not and can not be a matter of spatial or
temporal sequence. Mere duration or existence prolonged is
no better than existence. The truth seems to be that develop-
ment is nothing if we try to define it in terms of a simple ‘before’
and “after.' The sequence must be, or is, a significant before
and after. The burden of Green's philosophy is that significance
is the universal mark of reality. Development, like every other
aspect of the world, must, consequently, have a meaning and a
value before it can be truly real. But the condition of all value,
as we have previously shown, is individuality made possible
through judgment of a self-distinguishing consciousness, capable
of apprehending and striving for an ideal. It is, indeed, not at
all clear how any change could take place without this guiding
thread of an ideal end, but it is certain that orderly change (the
very essence of the idea of evolution) would be impossible with-
out it. Progress will, therefore, consist in the constant realiza-
tion of an immanent ideal.
It may readily be admitted that Green's philosophy does not
lay any special significance on the reality of time. If evolution
is possible only on a theory which admits that time is an ulti-
mate and independent reality, then Green's theory does not
furnish a basis for evolution. He is apparently committed to the
belief that the total and permanent system of relations is not in
time; man is not in time; God is not in time; reality itself is not
in time. Notwithstanding this, he continues to speak confi-
dently of change and development. The explanation of this
* Prolegomena, sec. 189.
86 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
paradox is found in the observation that none of the terms which
Green uses in discussing development are names for objects of
knowledge. The whole growth takes place in a spiritual world;
from the single fact to the universal system of facts nothing can
be pointed out as “here' or ‘now.' In an earlier section it was
shown that it is only in a world of objects that the categories of
time, space, cause, et cetera, have an application. ‘This thing is
behind that,’ or ‘the sound followed the blow,” and all other
similar judgments are dependent upon these mechanical relations
for their meaning; but the meaning of one of them is not related
to the meaning of another in the same or a similar way, i. e., no
meaning fills more space than another, or takes more time. On
the other hand, what ideas or meanings lose in this sort of
existential reality they gain in a dynamic or developmental
character. One meaning does not cause another, but one
meaning grows out of another and this kind of growth is not
dependent upon time for its significance. Briefly, Green's
contention is that time is a category of meaning, not meaning a
category of time. Whatever development such a system allows
will be infinitely more than a temporal sequence, and an account
of that development will be infinitely more than a ‘natural
history.’ This kind of growth cannot be registered by the ticks
of a clock, but must be told in stages of individuality." It must
be recorded in terms of the fragmentary and the more complete;
the germ and the full fruit. The spirit does not grow from hour
to hour but from less to greater perfection, not from particularity
to universality, but from individuality to individuality. Such a
development is best observed in the growth of the human soul.”
We have seen that God has been defined as the ideally com-
1 The first part of this conception closely resembles Bergson's notion that “pure
duration’ is not made up of moments of time. The second part, however, that
development consists in realizing an immanent ideal, or that the germ of all is
in the merest fragment of reality, seems to be foreign to Bergson's philosophy.
* As pointed out when discussing the relation of consciousness and the time
series (Chapter IV), Green has no intention of abstracting spirit from the temporal
order, but merely insists that we shall distinguish the relation of spirit to time
from the relations in time. In this connection he applies the same general theory
to the question of development. We must learn to distinguish the concrete relation
of growth (which undoubtedly has a temporal aspect) and the abstract relation of
a mere “before and after.”
GOD: THE COMPLETE INDIVIDUAL. 87
plete individual correlative with a system of reality through
which all individuality is made possible. God is, therefore,
identical in principle, but infinitely removed in degree from the
finite individual. Such an interpretation of the nature of God
frees Green at once from the charge of holding to a static abso-
lute. God is not a predetermined goal to which we are coming
nearer at each stage until at some far off future time we shall
have attained it. God is in the process of being realized, in the
sense that the ideal of the artist is forever being realized, although
never actually realized because the ideal recedes as it is approxi-
mated, or better, the ideal is literally created in the process of
actualization. “The ideal exists,” writes Green, “in his [the
artist's] consciousness, yet not in its full reality, for if it did it
would be no longer an ideal.”
Our struggle is a permanent process of becoming complete
individuals, and is based upon an ideally complete individual
apprehended by the finite self. It is to be noted that the rela-
tion of the actual to the possible is in this case not quite the same
as it is in the partial and complete object. Such a process as we
see exhibited in the growth of an acorn into an oak will hardly
illustrate self-realization since the case is in some measure
abstract, both of the terms being externalized. We cannot, for
example, properly say that an acorn is forever becoming an
1 III, 269. Compare with this view Bergson's remark that “no one, not even
the artist, could have foreseen exactly what the portrait would be, for to predict
it would have been to produce it before it was produced—an absurd hypothesis
which is its own refutation. Even so with regard to the moments of our life, of
which we are the artisans. Each of them is a kind of creation. And just as the
talent of the painter is formed or deformed—in any case, is modified—under the
very influence of the works he produces, so each of our states, at the moment of its
issue, modifies our personality, being indeed the new form that we are just assum-
ing.” (Creative Evolution, p. 6.) There is this difference, however, between
Green and Bergson: Bergson recognizes the actual incompleteness of any judg-
ment just as Green does, but from this fact concludes that judgment must be cast
aside, knowledge abandoned, and intuition substituted for it. By intuition he
hopes to grasp that which for knowledge is an ideal. Green, on the other hand,
while holding that the actual nature of ultimate reality is never quite grasped by
1<nowledge, still holds that knowledge, or judgment, is the only means we have of
grasping the ultimate. Indeed, it is just this paradox which, according to Green,
constitutes the significance of consciousness. The ultimate is truly forever beyond,
but beyond as an ideal is forever beyond conscious attainment. As the ideal
makes*the struggle significant, so the ideal infinite is the basis of finite valuation.
88 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
oak but never becomes one, because the ideal oak is one set up
by an agency other than the acorn itself. “The acorn,” says
Green, “is in possibility identical with the oak, but the oak is
nothing to the acorn. That is, the acorn has no consciousness
which its virtual identity with the oak affects. The identity
exists, not for it, but for a consciousness to which oak and acorn
are alike relative. But in the process constituting the moral
life, . . . the germ and the development, the possibility and
its actualization, are one and the same consciousness of self.
That in virtue of which I am I, and can in consequence so set
before myself the realization of my own possibilities as to be a
moral agent, is that in virtue of which I am one with God.”
Such a system of philosophy offers the only true basis for a
genuine evolution because the ideal is dynamic. The world
in its totality is not a closed system. We cannot predict the
future in detail. Although we know in general that it will be
intelligible, we do not know the exact terms in which its intel-
ligibility will appear.
It is a singular fact that the two most insistent criticisms
of Green's philosophy cancel each other. On the one hand, the
objection is raised that his philosophy allows no room for change;
and on the other hand, that the process is interminable. That
God is a fixed goal has already been sufficiently refuted by the
foregoing account of the nature of an ideal. The ideal is that
for which we ever strive but at which we never arrive. It is
such a notion of an eternal process to which the second objection
is raised. “Why a completely realized self should think it
worth while,” says Professor Dewey, “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 com-
plete self had produced the incomplete self, it should do so under
conditions rendering impossible (seemingly eternally so) any
adequate approach of the incomplete self to its own complete-
ness . . . should make us wary of the conception.” If we are
1 III, 226. Cf. especially Prolegomena, sec. I87.
* Philosophical Review, II, 654. If our interpretation is correct Green would
be the first to agree with Professor Dewey's conclusion expressed at the close of the
article cited. “The fixed ideal is an distinctly the bane of ethical science today
GOD: THE COMPLETE INDIVIDUAL. 89
to understand that the ‘Why?', to which the critic is seeking an
answer, is synonymous with the question “Why is the universe
as it is?”, no one can hope to answer him. Green, for one, does
not attempt such a demonstration." In the words of Bosanquet,
“All explanation is within the universe, not of it.” But if,
on the other hand, the critic is complaining because Green did
not set up a static goal, ‘some far off divine event,’ which might
one day be reached, he is unconsciously crediting Green with the
only basis for a true theory of development. Green's strength
is shown in his refusal to adopt this type of explanation.
This result is unintelligible to a mechanical or naturalistic
philosophy, which moves always within the most superficial
aspect of the world of objectivity. In the world of objects we
know that a goal is set up at the end of a course and that the
runners approach it until they arrive, or pass beyond it.” This
naïve view of reality can only be overcome by the way of some
such philosophy of the individual as Green has given. The
shell of objectivity must be pierced to the very soul and then
mechanism will be seen to rest on individuality. In reality
itself the start and the goal and the runner are all included, but
included in such a way as to preserve their severalty. There
as the fixed universe of mediaevalism was the bane of the natural science of the
Renascence.” (P. 664. Italics mine.) It is but fair to say that in all of Green's
talk of ideals he seems nowhere to refer to a fixed ideal. Perhaps he did not recog-
nize that there could be such an ideal.
1. Cf. Prolegomena, sec. 82.
* Logic (second edition), I, 137.
* Here lies the fallacy of likening life to a game or a race where the goal may
actually be reached. On the other hand, we are not assisted by supposing the goal
to be a sort of mobile will-o'-the-wisp which goes on before us into the surrounding
darkness, because we are still entangled with mechanical metaphors. Caird has
better expressed the nature of the struggle; “It is true that “the margin' of know-
ledge “fades forever and forever as we move’; but, if we might correct the metaphor,
it fades not before us merely, but also into us. We are not condemned to chase a
phantom which continually flies before us, so that we are as near to it at first as at
last. Rather, we are pursuing a course of self-development in which we are con-
tinually realizing more deeply and fully what the world, the object of all our thought
and action, is, and what we are, who think and act upon it; and in which, by neces-
sary consequence, we are continually learning more of God, who is the ultimate
unity of our own life and of the life of the world.” (The Evolution of Religion, Vol.
I, pp. 139–140.) We make our own goal; we seek it; we fail to grasp it; not because
it eludes our grasp, but because we despise it in the light of another.
90 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN.
is no better characterization of reality than in terms of indi-
viduality.
Whatever process there is in reality must, therefore, be an
internal process of concretion; the very process, exhibited in
the growth of individuality in which the finite individual, in
being able to know, and to will an end, is already, in principle,
one with the infinite individual. This is a significant change.
Moreover, if the process is to remain significant the goal must
remain beyond the present grasp. The key to Green's philosophy
is found in the significance of individuality made possible in a
world of struggle for completion.
1915
INDEX
Actual and possible, 77 ff.
Aristotle, 21 ff.
Baldwin, J. M., 47 n., 20 m.
Balfour, A. J., 7 n., 68 m.
Barratt, Alfred, 16 m.
Bergson, Henri, 46 m., 47 n., 48 m., 52 n.,
6I, 62 m., 63, 73 m., 82 n., 84 m., 86 m.,
87 m.
Berkeley, George, 24 f, 79 m.
Bosanquet, B., 23, 38 m., 41 m., 42,
57 n., 59 m., 83, 89. -
Bradley, F. H., I6 n., 28, 41 n., 52 n.,
58 m.
Caird, Edward, 2 n., 4 m., 73–74 m., 77,
89 m.
Caird, John, II.
Causality, 60 ff.
Consciousness, 44 ft., 60 ff., 74.
Subject.)
Creation, 63 ff.
(See
Darwin, Charles, 2, 81.
Datum. (See Fact.)
Descartes, Rene, 46, 47 n.
Dewey, John, 8o, 88.
Eastwood, A., IQ m.
Empiricism, weakness of, 8.
Evolution, 2, 55 fſ., 81 ff.
Experience, Io.
Fact, nature of, 3 ff.; and fancy, 27;
and judgment, 38 ft.
Fairbrother, W. H., 5.
Fichte, J. G., 47 m.
Fullerton, G. S., 5 m.
God, the complete individual, 67 ff.; and
nature, 72; and man, 74 ff.; Berkeley's
conception of, 79 ft.
Green, T. H., not a psychologist, 3 ff.;
method of, 9 ff.; problem of, 2 ff.
Haldane, R. B., 4 m.
Haldar, H., I9 m.
Hegel, G. W. F., 9 f., I7, 51 m., 65, 76 m.
Hume, David, 8 ft., I6, I8, 24, 48 ft.
Individual defined, iv, 33.
Johnson, R. B. C., Io n., 19 m.
Judgment, identified with meaning,
36 f.; simplest component of knowl-
edge, 38 ff.; process of individualiza-
tion, 39 f.; germ of knowledge, 40 fſ.;
hypothetical character of, 41 ff.
Kant, I., method of, 2 ft., 9 ff.
Locke, John, I, I4 ff., 24, 31, 39, 46, 5o;
method of, 8 ft.
Logic, formal, 3I.
Meaning, 35 fſ.
Merz, J. T., 82 n.
Metaphysics, problem of, 2 ff.
Method, Green's objective, I2.
Nature, Green's definition of, I2.
Nettleship, R. L., 62 n.
Object, individuality of, 18 ff.; consti-
tuted by relations, 20 ff.; of sense
versus object of knowledge, 21 ff.
Pattison, Mark, I6 m.
Psychology, problem of, 3 ff.; method
of, 8 ff.; facts of, not questioned by
Green, 3.
Real, not distinguished from unreal,
27 ff.
Reality, and consciousness, 13 ff.; and
knowledge, 21.
Reid, Thomas, 23.
Ritchie, D. G., 13, 58.
Royce, Josiah, 47 n., 82 n.
Scepticism, I8.
Science, field of, distinguished from
philosophy, 3 f.
Sensation, mere sensation does not exist,
28 f.
Seth, Andrew, 4 n., 64 n., 65.
Sidgwick, H., 9 m.
Space, 50 fſ.
Spencer, H., 81 ff.
Spinoza, 51 m., 62 m.
Spiritual Principle, 12, 44.
Stout, G. F., 7 m.
Sturt, Henry, 5 ff.
Subject, individuality of, 46 ff., 62 ft.
Subjectivism, 6 ff., 23 ff.
Substance, 50 fſ.
Taylor, A. E., 7 n., 56 f.
Time, 53 ff.
Thing-in-itself, 13 ff.
Thought, false conception of, 29 ff.
Wallace, William, 2I.
Ward, James, 47 m.
Watson, John, 7.4 n.
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