c THE SERVICE OF THE STATE THE SERVICE OF THE STATE FOUR LECTURES ON THE POLITICAL TEACHING OF T. H. GREEN BY J. H. MUIRHEAD, M.A., LL.D. PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM "Who serves a greatness not his own" LONDON JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W. i 908 To M.T.M. Who taught me to feel what Green taught me to think. 1156919 "Many of the troubles of to-day reflect the distraction of minds to which a sane and balanced view of society has never been adequately presented. 1 ' 1 B. BOSANQUET. BIBLIOGRAPHY Prolegomena to Ethics. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1883. Works. Longmans, Green and Co., 1888. Sermons. Longmans, Green and Co., 1888. Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation. (Reprinted from Works, Vol. II.) Longmans, Green and Co., 1901. The Philosophy of T. H. Green. BY W. H. FAIEBEOTHER, 1896. Lectures on the Ethics of T. H. Green. BY H. SIDGWICK, 1902. Principles of State Interference. BY D. G. RITCHIE, 1891. Six Radical Thinkers. BY JOHN MAcCmJN, 1907. PREFACE WHEN I was asked to lecture on T. H. Green's political teaching at the Summer Meeting in Oxford last year, it seemed a favourable oppor- tunity to recall attention to the light that a comprehensive and coherent theory of the nature of the State and its relation to the individual may throw upon current problems. At the time at which Green wrote the Indi- vidualism which had been the leading note of the earlier part of the nineteenth century, though largely discredited in practice, seemed to have acquired new theoretic support from its supposed alliance with the doctrine of natural selection, and to be destined to recover all its old ground under the vigorous leadership of Herbert Spencer. Green was profoundly convinced of the inadequacy of the whole point of view as a basis of construc- tive statesmanship, and had the foresight, in his Lectures on Political Obligations, to bring all the resources of his mind to the task of rendering the ground for it henceforth untenable. It is mainly due to the influence which he exerted on the thought of the last part of the century, that xi xii PREFACE open appeals to the individualistic point of view only serve to discredit in the public mind the causes that depend upon them. If he has made the bearing of his teaching upon the question of Socialism less obvious, this is only because at the time at which he wrote the danger to continuity of national and industrial development seemed to come chiefly from the other side. The principles he advocated are not less applicable as a criticism of the Realism that sees in the State the organ of an all-wise and omnipotent Providence, than to the Nominalism that sees in it only the name for " a crowd of individual administrators." In preparing the lectures on which this small book is founded, I felt that it would be impossible to make the fiill scope of Green's ideas compre- hensible without some explanation of the philo- sophical doctrine with which they were in organic connection. In now venturing to publish them, I need hardly say that I have added considerably to what I found it possible to say upon this head in the short course of popular lectures I was asked to give. I have not, however, cared to alter the lecture form, which may serve to remind the reader of my justification for retailing much that is already familiar in current philosophical literature. A different justification is required for the liberty I have permitted myself in not always being careful to attribute to Green only these PREFACE xiii applications of his teaching tor which chapter and verse may be quoted in his writings. The interest of his ideas seems to me to depend far more on their general bearing upon contemporary life and the ideas they have suggested to others, than on the particular form in which he expressed and sought himself to apply them. What I have aimed at is to be true to the spirit of a teacher whose power and personality as all who knew him felt were, owing to his untimely death, very inadequately expressed in his published works. I am indebted to Dr Helen M. Wodehouse for carefully reading the manuscript of these lectures and for useful suggestions. J. H. MUIRHEAD. March 1908. CONTENTS PAGE BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . ix PREFACE xi LECTURE I THE PROBLEM OF THE 'SEVENTIES Green and his contemporaries The problem of his time Philosophical basis of solution in theory of knowledge The human and divine mind . 1-18 LECTURE II THE IDEA OF THE GOOD Desire presupposes self-consciousness, self-conscious- ness freedom The ideal not greatest happiness, but a form of human life Objection to the vagueness of the Good as thus defined The pragmatic test Characteristics of the Good as (1) personal, (8) social The Good as a divine principle Idealism and Evolution- Idealism anH Positivism , . >. 19-46 XV xvi CONTENTS LECTURE III I'Mk. STATE AS WILL AND IDEA The need of a new theory of the relation of the State to the Individual "Will, not Force, the basis of the State"" Earlier political philosophy in England Meaning of Green's Theory The place of circumstances Great Men The general will The rights of indi- viduals Illustration from the right of property 47-80 LECTURE IV IDEALISM AND POLITICS Idealism and Democracy State interference Socialism Idealism and Empire Conclusion 81-113 APPENDIX 115 INDEX 117 THE SERVICE OF THE STATE LECTURE I THE PROBLEM OF THE 'SEVENTIES Green and his contemporaries The problem of his time Philosophical basis of solution in theory of knowledge The human and divine mind. GREEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES. When in 1875 I entered as an undergraduate at Balliol, there were three remarkable men in the College, all since passed away, but then at the height of their powers and reputation. Of these the Master, Benjamin Jowett, exercised by far the widest influence over the College and in the outside world. He was like an atmosphere pervading the place and extending its pungent influence far beyond it. Whenever in the world a Balliol man was settled, there was a pupil of Jowett. Richard Lewis Nettleship exercised a magnetic charm on all who came in touch with him, and was the best-loved man in the College perhaps in the University. This 2 THE PROBLEM OF THE 'SEVENTIES was not merely due to the union in him of the scholar and athlete, so dear to Oxford. There was an intellectual grace and modesty about him that, while it prevented him from seeking or making disciples, "won all men to him." But undoubtedly the deepest influence was that of Thomas Hill Green. This was clear at the time from the impression he made upon the ablest men in the College. " To other real or imagined great people in Oxford," writes one, " I took off my hat, but before Green I felt as if I could take off not the hat only but also the head" It has since been proved by the effect of his teaching on the whole intellectual and social movement that has marked the close of the nineteenth century. Yet the source of this influence was by no means obvious at the time. To many of his contemporaries he appeared merely a somewhat eccentric college tutor who wasted his time in attending unprofit- able parochial discussions of the City Council, of which he was a member, or starting evening schools for working men in the slums of St Clement's. To others he was a dry metaphysical lecturer who wasted the time of his pupils in minute and wiredrawn criticism of England's greatest thinkers, expressed with an obscurity of style which rivalled that of his favourite hero, Sir Harry Vane, of whom it was said by Baxter that "his unhappiness lay in this that his doctrines were so cloudily formed and expressed that few could understand them, and therefore he had few i.] THE MODERN SPIRIT 3 disciples." What in reality made him the greatest force of his time in the University was just the union in him of these two elements, the citizen and the idealist philosopher not as accidentally com- bined in a man distracted between them, but as organically united with each other. To him an ideal was no creation of an idle imagination, meta- physics no mere play of the speculative reason. Ideals were the most solid, and metaphysics the most practical thing about a man. On the other hand, practice was no conventional round of tasks, but the opportunity of giving expression to ideas, of clothing them with substance as we clothe our thoughts in language. The aim of these lectures is to show more fully what the union of the two meant to Green himself, and by what potency in his ideas they have entered into the spirit of our own time, and hold a place to-day as one of the chief directing forces in thought and action. THE PROBLEM OF HIS TiME. 1 Green has him- self described the characteristic spiritual feature of our own time. "To be free, to understand, to enjoy," he tells us, " is the claim of the modern spirit." To find ourselves at home in the universe, to realise all the capacities of human nature in a world adaptable to our purposes, to feel that we are cast in an environment that is responsive 1 See Popular Philosophy in its Relations to Life, Works, vol. iii. p. 92 foil. What follows is a paraphrase rather than epitome of this essay. 4 THE PROBLEM OF THE 'SEVENTIES to our deepest needs, are spiritual claims which any system of doctrine seeking adherents in these days must satisfy. A review of the chief move- ments of recent times is a review of the chief forms in which they have found expression. The modern revivals of poetry and art are founded on the conviction of the essential kinship between nature and spirit ; religion seeks the divine in the human ; political effort in all its highest forms is the expression of a belief in the reality of the social spirit as the deeper element in the indi- vidual. Yet the teaching of the reigning philo- sophy as represented by such great names as John Stuart Mill, George Henry Lewes and Herbert Spencer seemed to be entirely out of sympathy with these assumptions. It is not necessary to go deeply into it to find the reason. The analysis of mental life in which it was founded had succeeded in resolving the contents of mind into impressions coming from without, and their reproduction in images and ideas that followed laws of their own analogous to the laws of gravitation and cohesion which controlled and explained the action of material things. In the same spirit it had analysed our volitional life into the attractions and repulsions which our pains and pleasures have established between ourselves and things. It is these feelings, or rather desire for the one aversion from the other, and not the things themselves or any relation in which by inheritance or acquired disposition we stand to i.] MODERN PHILOSOPHY 5 them which are the real motives of our actions. We are not here concerned with the details of this theory, but merely with the consequences that seemed to follow, and indeed were openly claimed by its supporters. If man's thoughts were thus controlled by laws of mechanical action and reaction between his impressions and ideas, if his conduct was the inevitable result of the strongest desire or aversion as determined by past or present feelings of pleasure and pain, there seemed no place left for freedom. Every stage and phase of the life of man as knower and doer seemed as inevitably predetermined as the fall of a stone or the flow of a river. In other forms of determinism it has been possible to find inspiration in the idea of an over- ruling Providence selecting and directing man's action as the higher form of his own will or self. But the logical consequence of this philosophy seemed to be the denial of the assurance of any such direction, and even of any self at all. Nor was this all. Philosophy stands for the effort to understand to know the very inmost reality of things. This is its boast. To this it has sacrificed all. Yet what has it gained ? Our impressions and ideas, truly, we may understand, at least we must accept : we have them, and therefore they are. But what guarantee is there that they represent anything more permanent than themselves? Once this question is seriously asked, there can be but one 6 THE PROBLEM OF THE 'SEVENTIES [LBCT. answer. Whether in the form of scepticism as in Hume, or of agnosticism as in Huxley and Spencer, we seem committed to the denial of any real knowledge, the possibility of any true understanding. Not only is the human spirit set against itself in the antagonism between the desire to know and to be free, between reason and the deepest element in moral consciousness, but there lurks this deeper contradiction in reason itself. To these conclusions an alternative was indeed offered by the philosophy which from the time of Butler had opposed itself to the Baconian school, and this was powerfully represented in such writers as James Martineau at the time of which we are speaking. But the appeal to intui- tions in which it sought to find protection against the conclusions of a too victorious analysis, has never been able to make its peace with modern methods of research. To accept it was merely to close one rift in the human spirit by opening another. Nor was it of any avail to appeal to the faith of the poet, the evangelist or the practical reformer. It was indeed true, as has been said, that their work presupposed the existence of a world of spiritual values, to which physical facts stood in the relation of symbol to reality. "The man," as Green puts it, "to whom nature has become human, who has recognised either a kingdom of God or a power of eternal death within himself, i.] THE NEED OF THEORY 7 who has found in a free state not a mere organisa- tion for satisfying his wants, but an object of interest identical with his interest in himself, has already for himself answered the question whether it is he that is natural or nature that is spiritual." But valid as this answer might be for the indi- vidual it could not be made generally available for those who were touched with the peculiar malady of the age " the disease of thought." And this defect could not fail to react on practice. / " Man needs the theory of his own greatness." If in an age like ours no such theory is forth- coming, "the very fullness of moral and artistic life thickens into speculative chaos." Instead of the whole-hearted co-operation between thought and practice which has marked the great periods of achievement, we have distraction and hesita- tion the palsy that comes from "the scepticism of the best." If satisfaction was to be found at once for the intellectual and the moral part of man's nature, thought must be met on its own ground : nothing short of an entire reconstruction of philosophical theory would suffice. It was here that Green saw the problem of his time. His originality consisted not so much in seeing it (others saw it as clearly as he), but in the depth with which he felt it, and the particular manner in which, both by thought and practice, he set himself to meet it. It is worth while, in view of recent criticism, 8 THE PROBLEM OF THE 'SEVENTIES to emphasise the point of view from which he thus approached the problem of philosophy. He has been attacked by humanistic writers as the prince of intellectualists, a metaphysical Frankenstein who spent himself in setting up as the ultimate truth of things a logical monster unrelated to human purposes. It may very well be that in the issue of the controversy, which he waged unremittingly with the abstractions of the prevailing philosophy, he identified himself too exclusively with the in- tellectual tradition which it represented. But his starting-point, at least, was humanistic. The test of philosophical ideas was their working power as a basis for human effort. They must be in harmony with man's deepest desires and aspira- tions more particularly with his need to be at one with nature and his fellow-men. To justify this unity to the intelligence "to find formulas adequate to the actions of reason as exhibited in nature and human society in art and religion" was the purpose of philosophy as he understood it. Its failure just to discover such formula* was the condemnation of the popular British philosophy of his time. PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF SOLUTION IN THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE. Stated in the most general terms, Green saw that its mistake had consisted in starting from parts taken in abstrac- tion from the whole to which they belong. The correction must be to insist upon the wholeness or i.] STARTING POINT OF IDEALISM 9 unity of life and experience as the only means of understanding the parts. This, he held, must be the keynote of the new philosophy, the master- light of all its seeing. His own strenuous ana- lytical studies were all directed to bring it home from various sides. They take their start from i the theory of knowledge as the most funda- mental and the most clearly defined of the problems of philosophy. The older analysis had sought to explain knowledge as the result of the mechanical aggregation or (if this was too obviously inadequate a metaphor, as it seemed to Mill himself) the chemical combination of ideas. Interesting and fertile as this way of regarding mind when adopted with full consciousness of its presuppositions and limitations might be, it could only lead to error when taken as an adequate account of concrete mental processes, and made the starting - point for metaphysical deductions. The reason was that in its effort after simplification it had overlooked the element due to the particular nature of consciousness as a unifying, interpreting and therefore interpene- trating principle. In the language of the time it overlooked the part played by the mind itself, which as that by and for which alone there could be any combination of ideas, could never be the result of the mere combination. Rightly regarded knowledge is an active function, not an accretion : a development of the nature of mind as a unifying process, not the mere filling of a passive B 10 THE PROBLEM OF THE 'SEVENTIES receptacle, however mouldable this may be con- ceived of as being. Adopting the language of recent psychology, which Green's analysis antici- pates, it is the fulfilment of a purpose or " intent," not a mere forced acknowledgment of a " content " a conquest as we might say required of the mind by the conditions of its own expanding life, not a mere passive acquiescence in a foreign visitation. If we ask wherein particularly this function consists, it is seen that, like all other vital functions, it consists in a process of differ- entiation and integration. It differs from others in that its operation is motived by the conscious- ness of the all-important distinction between self and object, what appears to us and what is in reality, and of the necessity which is bound up with the very being of mind to bring the two to a unity. It is this self-differentiating and self- uniting process which marks off human con- sciousness from that of the lower animals. The precise difference between this interpretation and that of the older school may be illustrated by an example. If we ask wherein our knowledge of the room in which we are consists, we may, if we like, resolve it into "impressions" of colour, expanse, light and shade, heat and cold, noise and silence ; but these are not the room : taken by themselves, they are mere appearances. To know the room we have to recall where we are and what we are about, the Oxford and the Schools we otherwise know, and herewith its relations to i.] TO KNOW IS TO RELATE 11 other things and places, working it thus at once into the organised context of our experience and into the realities of our world. Before we can be said to have an object of knowledge, we must have interpreted the scattered data by the pre- existing contents of our minds which we call our " experience," and by recognising the harmony and continuity which subsists between the new and the old, have assented to the instatement of the newcomer as part of a system or whole constituted and maintained by the relations in which all its parts stand to one another. This in condensed statement is Green's well- known doctrine that " to know is to relate." Thus barely stated it is not without its difficulties, and lends itself perhaps too easily to parody. Thus he has been accused of seeking to resolve everything into relations with nothing to relate, as some physicists are accused of resolving matter into motion with nothing to move. This is as though we were to resolve a railway locomotive into its coupling irons, 1 or a sentence into its connecting particles. It need hardly be said that this was not Green's meaning. What he meant was that what gives reality and stability to our knowledge is the reality and stability of the relations that are established between its several parts. To know a thing as it truly is, is to in- corporate it through its differences and identities with other things which already by a similar 1 Professor James's illustration. 12 THE PROBLEM OF THE 'SEVENTIES process have achieved comparative fixity and sub- stantiality. Apart from this organising process knowledge would resolve itself into a series of isolated impressions as meaningless as the cars without the couplings, the vocables without their connection in articulate sentences. Along with this correction in what we might call the psychology of knowledge (the analysis of the process which actually takes place when we know anything) goes a correction in the older account of the criterion in the logic of knowledge. Mill's statement of this in his Logic is well known. We cannot here go into detail. The conclusion is, that the truth of any item of knowledge, e.g. that the sun has risen on this cloudy morning, ultimately rests upon our belief in the uniform- ing of nature, and that this itself rests on the accumulated experiences of constancy in the sequence of events. The defect of this account is not that it finds the criterion in an objective world of "nature," but that it seeks for the guarantee of harmony with nature in the mere accumulation of experiences of the connection between "ideas." Such an accumulation could only have meaning to a mind which brought to experience the conception of a world of consistent relations into which the fact that claims to be true must enter as an integral part if its claim is to be justified. The standard, in other words, is to be found in the mind's own ideal of nature as an inter- related whole. Without this no accumulation of experiences could give us more than "a bundle of expectations of which one might indefinitely strengthen or weaken another," but of which none could give to any other the right to claim to represent the real world and to be true. With it we are justified in seeing in the actual extent to which system is realised, as true knowledge develops, the guarantee of an ultimate unity between our knowledge and the reality of things. 1 THE HUMAN AND DIVINE MIND. The last words serve to remind us that a theory of knowledge was with Green only a step to a metaphysic or theory of reality and a theology or theory of God. From the above analysis it followed that there could be no reality that was not related to mind and the activities of mind. However beyond complete apprehension by our minds the ultimate reality of things might be, it could never be independent of mind. A thing in and by itself, such as Kant had supposed, and Hamilton and Spencer had borrowed from him, was a contradiction in terms. Nor is there any reason to believe that our thoughts about things, 1 For the more technical statement of the argument, I must refer to Green's lectures on the Logic of J. S. Mill (Works, vol. ii. especially pp. 304 and 306, quoted in the Appendix below). The point we have to carry with us as bearing directly on Green's theory of the Will is that when we speak of anything as true or false, we do so on the ground of its relation to a whole of organised knowledge existing actually in no human mind, but prefigured in every mind which is possessed of reason, and feels itself pledged to be reasonable. 14 THE PROBLEM OF THE 'SEVENTIES the relations by which we seek to understand them, are other than the real thoughts of real mind, or that in defining them as metaphysics seeks to do in its theory of cause, substance, and other ultimate forms of conception, it is not handling reality. From this Green passed with an almost startling rapidity to the existence of a self-revealing spirit, whose thoughts indeed are not as our thoughts, seeing that we know only in part, yet are not in essence different since it is part that we know. The argument for the being of the Divine he puts in several different ways, according as he looks at the constitution or at the end, at the content or at the " intent " of knowledge. From the former point of view it is argued that the reality of relations that can exist only in and for a mind, and yet which are not our individual creation, implies the reality of a universal mind by which they are created and maintained. " To assume because all reality requires thought to conceive it, that therefore thought is the condition of its existence, is indeed unwarrantable. But it is another matter if when we come to examine the constituents of that which we account real the determinations of things we find that they all imply some synthetic action which we only know as exercised by our own spirit. Is it not true of all of them that they have their being in relations ? And what other medium do we know of but a thinking consciousness in and through which the separate can be united in that way which consti- i.] THE BEING OF GOD 16 tutes relation? We believe that these questions cannot be worked out without leading to the con- clusion that the real world is essentially a spiritual world which forms one inter-related whole because related throughout to a single subject." 1 From the second point of view it is argued that the presence in us of an ideal of completed knowledge which is at once the source and the criterion of all truth, proves that our life is rooted in a form of being whose fullness is not exhausted in any merely temporal series. "The assurance of there being a reality one, complete and absolute has been the source of that very knowledge which cannot become a knowledge of such reality. It is involved in the presence of reason in us as the consciousness of a subject which we do not know but are, and through which we know. Though communicated to us in a mode which does not allow of its being in a strict sense known, it keeps before us an object which we may seek to become. It is an element of identity between us and a perfect being who is in full realisation what we only are in principle and possibility. That God is it 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 matter of fact, but it moves us to seek to become as He is." 2 But these arguments are in principle the same. 1 Works, vol. iii. p. 145. 2 Works, vol. iii. pp. 267-268. 16 THE PROBLEM OF THE SEVENTIES They both rest upon the axiom that the part implies the whole. Man only knows in part. But this is not all : the animals also may be said to know in part. Man knows that his knowledge is partial, and this can only mean that in the knowledge of the part the whole is in some sense already present. Stated in this condensed form, the doctrine of the "timeless self" of which our individual selves are " reproductions " is open to manifold misunder- standing. Nor are its difficulties diminished by the examination of the passages in which Green develops it, where it becomes obvious that there is a certain vacillation in his own thought. By some he has been accused of going too far; by others of not going far enough : he makes an unjustifiable assumption in identifying the ultimate or absolute reality with Mind and Will; and again he leaves us with a conception of the divine personality which excludes from it all movement, purpose, effort all, in a word, that is really characteristic of mind and will. This is not the place for detailed criticism. I am trying merely to make the general outlines and spirit of Green's teaching intelligible in relation to its practical tendencies. In reply, therefore, to the first objection, it is sufficient to note that he laid no stress on the attribute of personality as commonly understood. He habitually thought of the source of man's power as a " divine principle " that was hidden within him, rather than as a i.] CRITICISM OF THEOLOGY 17 divine personality existing outside of him. He maintained that we conceived most worthily of the highest above ourselves when we conceived of it under the form of the ideals which are highest in ourselves. If it is urged that this is to make God a merely subjective and at best " regulative " idea, he was prepared to reply that it could only appear so to one who made the twofold mistake of thinking of an ideal as something merely indi- vidual and subjective, and of God as we do of particular things in space and time. That our ideals are not merely subjective is shown not only by their internal authority, but by the establish- ment in the world of knowledge of the growing system we call truth. Nor are we likely to under- stand the real nature of our life in the world till we have learned to know the principle which sustains it not after the flesh but after the spirit, and to seek God not in the wilderness of temporal things but in the witness of reason and conscience. This explanation contains also the reply to the second objection. It is quite true that Green speaks of knowledge and good as something already achieved in the universal mind, and of God as "a subject which is eternally all that the self- conscious subject as developed in time has the possibility of becoming." l For such language there is ample warrant in the utterances of religion. In- deed it is difficult to see how it can be avoided by 1 Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 197 ; cp. p. 199 and vol. iii. p. 247. C 18 THE PROBLEM OF THE 'SEVENTIES a being who has only forms of language which pre- suppose time to express his relation to the Eternal. But the spirit of his teaching is to conceive of the Absolute not as in a state of rest contrasted with the movement and struggle of human life, as something "already existent" contrasted with a yet-to-be (this is to bring it under the conditions of time from which it is expressly excluded), but as the deeper reality of the life in time. And this, as we have seen, is best figured by us through the element in our own lives which we call our highest purposes or ideals. There is thus nothing to justify the criticism commonly brought against him by pragmatic writers that he undermines the value of human effort by making it a meaning- less reproduction of results already attained in an eternal world. It was no part of the Idealism with which his name is identified to maintain that we are unnecessary to the divine plan, or to deny that in knowledge as it may be realised by us a new result is achieved, new possibilities come to light, that out of the treasure house of the Eternal are brought forth things that are at once old and new. From these metaphysical, it may be mystical conclusions, we must now turn to the truths that correspond to them in Green's theory of Good, which more immediately underlies his political teaching. LECTURE II THE IDEA OF THE GOOD Desire presupposes self -consciousness, self - consciousness freedom The ideal not greatest happiness, but a form of human life Objection to the vagueness of the Good as thus defined The Pragmatic Test Character- istics of the Good as (1) personal, (2) social The Good as a divine principle Idealism and Evolution Idealism and Positivism. IN the last lecture I tried to show how the problem of his time presented itself to Green. While every- where in art and poetry, in politics and religion, there were the stirrings of new life inspired by the belief in the presence in man of a principle that raised him above nature, philosophy seemed to offer no means of justifying this faith to the logical reason, but appeared, on the contrary, to have demonstrated man's entire subjection to the laws of mechanical action and reaction, by which physical events are explained. This division of the modern spirit against itself Green sought to heal by a re-examination in the light of fuller philo- sophical knowledge of the grounds of this con- clusion, whereby he succeeded in showing that the popular theory rested on a misinterpretation of the ultimate facts of human nature. Put in a word his 19 20 THE IDEA OF THE GOOD argument was that the impressions and images which had been taken as ultimate psychical con- stituents analogous to the atoms of the material world were in reality a fiction. Instead of being primary data of consciousness, stuff of the mind supplied ready-made from without, our sensations take form and being as elements in knowledge from the mind's own synthetic activity. Relation, therefore, is a fundamental factor in our world which so far from being derivable by analysis from the data of experience is presupposed in the very structure of all that can be given to a mind that is capable of self -consciousness. As interpreted by Green, we saw further that the admission of this contention carried with it the consequence that human consciousness was only explicable on the presupposition of the existence of a universal or divine consciousness, present at once in mind and Nature and forming the guarantee of their ultimate unity. We have now to see how he applied these results to human conduct: what light they seemed to him to throw on the nature of desire and will, the ideal of human life, and the relation between human ends and the wider purposes discernible in the world at large. DESIRE PRESUPPOSES SELF - CONSCIOUSNESS, SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS FREEDOM. We have already seen the interpretation that the current theory gave to the meaning and mode of operation of motives in human conduct. Our actions were conceived .] HUMAN MOTIVE 21 of by it as determined partly by natural impulses and wants, partly by the remembered pains and pleasures that have accompanied former experiences. In either case we have an entirely natural sequence of events, the rise of the want or the idea of the former feeling, followed by an activity deriving its direction and energy from the direction given to it by the motive and the strength with which it acts. The cause or motive, and with it the action, may be of any degree of complexity, but this can- not alter its fundamental character as an event conditioned by other events, as a resultant in mechanics is conditioned by the forces that enter into it. According to Green, this account is as entirely misleading as the corresponding account of knowledge. It omits the distinguishing mark of human desire, whereby it becomes something more than animal impulse or appetite. What makes desire as what makes knowledge possible, is the relation of an object to a conscious self, and through it to other objects. To desire a thing is not merely to feel a want or remember a pleasure, but to set the idea of the thing before the mind as more or less definitely related to the self, and the other objects in which as a self it is perma- nently interested. It is true men often seem to act without any such reference beyond the moment, but just in proportion as they do so, do they relapse into the condition of the lower animals, of creatures controlled not by conscious purposes but by "events," accidental impulses coming to 22 THE IDEA OF THE GOOD [cr. them from the world without, or from organic reflexes and instincts within their own bodies. This correction implies several things which it is important to carry along with us. 1. According to the older view of which Hume was the most consistent exponent, the moving force in human action was always some feeling ; " passion " was the mistress, " reason " was only the handmaid concerned with the discovery of means to execute the behests laid upon her by another, but without part in the determination of ends. According to Green, the characteristic of human action is that it is determined by desire, which as distinct from mere appetite implies the distinc- tion of object desired from the self that desires, and the idea of some relation between them. To realise this is to perceive that there can be no such dualism between reason and passion or desire, as the older theory imagined. Even our most passing desires presuppose the operation of reason. 2. While this is so with regard to all our desires, it is still more obviously so in regard to the deeper desires and purposes that we call our sentiments and affections. These have been formed in us by a process of self-identification with things and other persons, presupposing more or less conscious approval, so that there is a true sense in which our world of interests or desired objects, like our world of known objects, may be said to be self-constituted. ii.] SELF-REALISATION 23 3. Seeing that the object of desire is conceived of in relation to ourselves as something to be pos- sessed or assimilated by us something we shall be better with there is a sense in which all desire may truly be said to be a form of self-seeking, the resulting volition a form of self-fulfilment or self- realisation. Whether this is accompanied by an actual feeling of ^.^-satisfaction will depend upon circumstances, as, for instance, our being alive and cognisant of the fulfilment of our desires ; but this does not alter the fact that desire projects itself upon an object or form of being with which for the time we identify ourselves, and in which in anticipation we live. The outcome of the whole analysis is not that some desires are more than natural, but that wherever we have desire at all, whether it be for some satisfaction of our animal wants, as in Esau's desire for the pottage, or for something as far as possible removed from them as in the desire for the kingdom of heaven, we have as an essential element in it a selecting, distinguishing, idealising activity, only possible to a being endowed with self- consciousness, and not to be explained by any merely physical analogies. To the student of recent psychology which confirms this analysis 1 it is unnecessary to labour the point. Its signifi- cance for Green lay in the fact that at a stroke it seemed to establish human life on a basis which 1 See, e.g., Stout's Manual of Psychology, p. 533 foil. It is not intended to identify Professor Stout with Green's deductions, or even his manner of stating the theory of the will. 24 THE IDEA OF THE GOOD raised it above the events and phenomena of the natural world. Events and phenomena in the shape of feelings and impulses enter into the moral life as chemical and mechanical processes enter into the life of a plant or sensations into the life of conscious beings ; but they no more make it what it is or explain its differentia than gravita- tion and chemical action can alone explain the plant, or sensations can explain the contents of the mind. Wherever there is human desire (to repeat it), there is a conception of something as "good," and going along with it, of a self which will be " better " for having realised a good which is yet to be. And this means that there is something present which is more than natural, and gives us the right to speak of human action as self-determined, and therefore free in a sense in which nothing that falls short of it can be said to be. THE IDEAL NOT GREATEST HAPPINESS, BUT A FORM OF HUMAN LIFE. But the freedom thus guaranteed, however real it may be, is only formal. The power of doing what he likes or what he chooses marks man off from the lower animals, but the value of the power depends wholly on what he likes or chooses to do. This, as we shall see, is an all-important point in Green's political teaching. Here we are concerned with the ground of it in his philosophy of conduct in general. And what we have to note is that wherever reflection n.] TRUE FREEDOM 25 has been directed with earnestness and insight to the question of the true meaning of freedom, it has always been seen that while it has its foundation in the power of self-determination as described above, true freedom consists not merely in being undetermined by any external or internal com- pulsive force, but in the acceptance of some object or principle of guidance felt to correspond with our own inmost and truest desires. This principle has been defined in various ways. To the Stoics it was the law of nature, to Kant the law of reason, to St Paul the divine will, that calls within us. But these are mere phrases whose significance altogether depends on the meaning we assign to the terms that are used. What is "nature"? What does " reason " enjoin ? What is the will of God concerning us ? To put these questions is to raise definitely the problem of the end of human life, the supreme need of the human soul, the principle that can give unity to our desires and purposes. It was in the answer that it gave to this question that Green found the central error and the chief source of practical misguidance in the popular philosophy. Prima facie, there seems nothing particularly impractical or misleading hi the doctrine that happi- ness or enjoyment of some kind is the chief end of man. As we have seen, it is implied in the claims of the modern spirit which are admitted by Idealist and Naturalist alike. It is not in the general defini- tion but in the specific meaning to be assigned D 26 THE IDEA OF THE GOOD [MCCT. to happiness that they part company. To the Naturalism of the day it meant pleasant feeling garnered into a life so arranged as to be pro- ductive of the greatest sum total. It was on a strenuous to some it now appears exaggerated polemic against this doctrine that Green expended his best powers of criticism in his chief ethical work. It is unnecessary to follow his arguments in detail. Their main tenor was to show in the first place that it was impossible to assign any clear meaning to the conception of a sum of pleasure. Our feelings follow one another in a series, a moment here then gone for ever, and there is no available means of accumulating and enjoying them as a whole. It is true (and this has since been argued against him 1 ) that no experience really perishes: everything that we feel as well as everything that we think and do leaves a residue or deposit that enters into all subsequent experience, but it is not in their original character that our pleasures and pains may be said thus to remain with us, but as elements in sentiments or habits of feeling deriving their value from the objects to which they attach, and not from their forming a part of an aggregate that can ever be enjoyed as a whole. But, secondly, even though the idea of a sum total of happiness could be made comprehensible, it never could be made to work as an ideal of human conduct, or the source of the distinction 1 E.g., by Professor Taylor in Problem of Conduct, p. 323 foil. ii.] HEDONISM 27 between what is morally good and bad, between what is and what ought to be. All that is distinctively human in the life of man springs not from the desire to possess this or that object, and so far to realise a better, but to be some- thing more and better than he is ; and this is precisely what an end such as the Hedonist con- ceives could never inspire. Hedonism emphasises the desirability of being as happy as you can under existing conditions of character ; it can offer no sufficient reason why you should face the pain of altering these conditions on the chance of in- creasing the sum total of your pleasures. Offer- ing no ideal of a qualitatively different self which has a claim upon us simply and solely as human beings, it fails to provide the rudiments of a sense of obligation, and leaves us to explain as best we may the distinction between inclination and duty, what is as a matter of fact, and what ought to be as a matter of right. Common-sense felt a vague disquiet at this hiatus, and had found a corresponding satisfaction in the vituperations of Carlyle, Ruskin and others. Green sought to justify the verdict of bankruptcy by showing precisely wherein Hedonism had failed. It failed because it offered as an end of human aspiration an object in which the human spirit, pledged by its own nature to self-betterment, in other words to a concrete life of developed faculty spent upon humanly worthy objects, could never find satisfac- tion. 28 THE IDEA OF THE GOOD His contention may be illustrated from what has already been said of the criterion of truth. We there saw that the error of sensationalism consisted in setting up the mere accumulation of subjective impressions, mere uniformity of experience, as the ultimate test of the validity of knowledge. Mutatis mutandis the error in regard to the criterion of conduct is the same. It sets up a mere accumulation of feelings, the multitude of satisfactions as the test of the value of life and conduct. And just as the logical error is corrected by insisting on the conception of systematic inter- dependence in the world of nature as the ultimate test of truth, so the ethical error is corrected by insisting on the conception of the harmonious development of the whole of human nature as the ultimate end, and the criterion of what is truly good. This correction enabled Green in the first place to substitute a concrete form of life an " energy," as the Greeks called it for the abstraction of a sum of feeling. It enabled him in the second place to give a real meaning to the distinction between moral good and evil, between what it is a duty and what it is pleasant or (in view of future pleasures and pains) prudent to do. The distinction presupposes a real qualitative difference between the objects of choice, but it was just this that the hedonist doctrine, according to which all objects were equally means to the one supreme good viz. pleasant feeling found it so difficult ".] THE GOOD LIFE 29 to justify. If on the other hand we start from the conception of the whole person, or will, we can understand how it may identify itself with different forms of itself or seek fulfilment in qualitatively different objects, some of which may be in harmony, some inconsistent with the nature of the self- objectify ing, self-idealising unity it claims to be. The differentia of the good life is not that it is controlled by a principle of intelligent self-seeking as Hedonism, or of the greatest pleasure of sentient beings as Utilitarianism teaches, but, as he himself puts it, " by the consciousness of there being some perfection which has to be attained, some vocation which has to be fulfilled, some law which has to be obeyed, something absolutely desirable whatever the individual may for the time desire ; that it is in ministry to such an end that the agent seeks to satisfy himself." l If it be objected that we find little evidence of such a consciousness in ordinary human beings, the reply is that this is because we seek it in the wrong way. It is true that few men reflect sufficiently on the meaning of moral conduct to realise the presuppositions which underlie it, but a moment's consideration of the attitude of mind that we call loyalty to the established system of social morality or to the work that lies nearest to our hand, is enough to convince us that the spirit that works in ordinary human life and in the saint or missionary is the same. 1 Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 134. 30 THE IDEA OF THE GOOD OBJECTION TO THE VAGUENESS OF THE GOOD AS THUS DEFINED. A more serious objection to the whole point of view is raised by the vagueness that seems to attach to the idea of perfection, as contrasted with that of pleasure or happiness, and its consequent ineffectiveness as a practical motive. Its very character as an ideal something whose realisation lies in the remote and even unimaginable future seems to render it unavailable as a prin- ciple of immediate guidance. And this has led some recent writers, 1 who have in general accepted Green's refutation of Hedonism as a theory of the end, to seek to reintroduce it as a practical criterion. The difficulty was anticipated by Green, who sought to meet it by pointing out that while the objection would hold of an ideal, no part of which has been realised, it is inapplicable to one that has already found partial embodiment in the actual life of man. To a certain extent the ideal has shown by its actual achievements what its contents specifically are, nor is it beyond the power of reflection to form at least some negative conclusion in regard to its complete realisation. We may convince ourselves that this realisation can only be attained in certain directions of our activity, not in others. 2 In this passage it could, I think, be shown that Green goes fatally near admitting the rival con- tention in insisting on the merely " negative " character of our knowledge of ideal good, but it 1 Particularly Dr M'Taggart in Studies of Hegelian Cosmology, chap. iT. c. 8 Prolegomena to Ethict, p. 180. ii.] SOCIOLOGY AND ETHICS 31 could also be shown that this is no part of his general doctrine, and, indeed, inconsistent with it. He is on safer ground when he goes on to point out that though we cannot say with any adequacy what the ideal capabilities are, "yet because the essence of man's spiritual endowment is the con- sciousness of having it, the idea of his having such capabilities, and of a possible better state of him- self consisting in their further realisation, is a moving influence in him. It has been the parent of the institutions and usages of the social judgments and aspirations through which human life has been so far bettered, through which man has so far realised his capabilities and marked out the path that he must follow in their further realisation." l THE PRAGMATIC TEST. For the detailed account of the origin and development of these institutions, and the moral ideas corresponding to them, Green would have pointed to the new science of sociology, at the same time warning us against the assumption that is apt to mingle with such investigations, that the interest in physical life and the struggle for existence in which the process of development starts, contains the ground of explanation and the measure of the value of the ideal interests in knowledge, art, and types of moral character, in which it ends. It is, he held, a fallacy, from which the sociologist who accepts the idea of evolution ought of all others to be free, to regard what is later in origin 1 Prolegomena to Ethust, p. 180. 32 THE IDEA OF THE GOOD as inferior in value and authority, or as exhibiting less of the nature and capabilities of the develop- ing organism. Interest in science and art, love of goodness for its own sake and of God as a spirit develop later than interest in food and housing, in a neighbour's territory or the happiness that these may give, but it is only on a very crude notion of development that they can be regarded as for that reason of secondary or merely instru- mental value. We may be willing to accept the formula that Pragmatists have made popular, that our ideas and ideals have value only in proportion as they "work," but it would be a fundamental error to interpret it in a crude utilitarian sense. In the use that we make of it we have always to remember that the "working" is relative to what it is that is working, and what it is working for. Here the fundamental fact is, that life changes as the spirit of man develops in it, and that what "works" is dependent on the form which it takes, as well as the form on the working. It was the clearness with which they grasped this principle and were able to see in the spiritual entities of science, art, morality and religion, objects not merely of supreme instru- mental value as the condition of the permanence of all other goods, but of intrinsic value as them- selves the expressions of self-conscious spirit that constituted to Green's mind the lasting distinction of the great Greek thinkers. It was this that enabled them to express, with a fullness of outline ii.J THE ETHICAL IDEAL 33 that has not been surpassed, the contents of the highest form of human good. Their account of it he sums up in a sentence. " It is the will to know what is true, to make what is beautiful, to endure pain and fear, to resist the allurements of pleasure (i.e. to be brave and temperate), if not, as the Greek would have said, in the service of the state, yet in the interest of some form of human society ; to take for one- self, to give to others, of these things which admit of being given and taken, not what one is inclined to but what is due." l The modern idea of the good has developed in respect of the range of persons who have the capacity and therefore the right to participate in this good and (as a consequence) in respect to the range of the application of the virtues. To the former we admit no exceptions wherever human reason exists in its normal capacity. In respect to the latter we admit no limits short of perfection. With the rise of the conception of human brotherhood have been swept away all the reservations and compromises, the limitations and narrowness of application that are so apt to astonish and scandalise the student of Greek civilisation. Yet when all allowances have been made, the main outlines of the ethical ideal are those which were fixed upon by the great Greek thinkers the free, disinterested devotion to knowledge and art, the conception of the 1 Prolegomena to tithics, p. 276. 84 THE IDEA OF THE GOOD intrinsic value of the rights of citizenship, and the life of social activities that is made possible by them. If to these conclusions of reflection we add the witness of the concrete forms in which the idea of the Good has embodied itself in laws, customs and institutions, as the best of the Greeks insisted that we should, the way becomes plain enough to him that will see. " In the broad result it is not hard to understand how man has bettered him- self through institutions and habits which tend to make the welfare of all the welfare of each, and through the arts which make nature, both as used and contemplated, the friend of man. And just so far as this is plain we know enough of ultimate moral good to guide our conduct ; enough to judge whether the prevailing interests which make our character are or are not in the direction which tends further to realise the capabilities of the human spirit." 1 CHARACTERISTICS OF THE GOOD AS (1) PERSONAL, (2) SOCIAL. From the account of the good here given, we can further understand how it should present itself to us under two aspects apparently contradictory, really complementary to each other. (1) It follows from what has been said of it as a form of will that it is individual or personal. Aristotle called it evepyeia, which had the advantage 1 Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 180, ii.] THE GOOD AS PERSONAL 35 of conveying the double meaning of activity and realisation the movement outward to an object which the soul sets before itself, and the corre- spondence of the object within the limits of human life to the " idea " or nature of the self which seeks fulfilment in it. Circumstances may be so arranged by education and adjustment of the environment as to aid in the formation of the habits on which such activity depends, but without the individual reaction the appropriation of the circumstances to the service of the end or some part of the end as above defined and the permeation of them with moral purpose there is no realisation of any distinctively human good. This does not, of course, mean that anything so abstract as the highest good is an object which the individual consciously sets before himself, but merely that apart from the exercise of individual will no least part of it is realisable. (2) It follows, in the second place, that the good is social. The ends in the pursuit of which the individual realises his true good are common to himself and all who are endowed with a like nature. The self which is fulfilled in them is no merely private self, but one which includes other selves, in that it includes objects in which all are interested as human beings. To the Utilitarian we have seen this was a stumbling-block, to the Hedonist foolishness. Happiness interpreted in terms of pleasure is by its very nature a private possession, one thing in the individual, another in 36 THE IDEA OF THE GOOD society, whose claim for priority of consideration in case of conflict can only be justified by a tour de force. 1 On the idealist view, on the other hand, difficult as it might be to see in detail that individual and social good are identical, the problem of explaining the distinction between selfishness and unselfishness, inclination and duty was in principle solved when it was seen that the good of others was bound up with the good of the one, not merely as a means to an end, but as an essential part of it. With the possible exception of the satisfaction of the bodily appetites, it would be difficult to point to any object of human desire into the thought of which the good of others or a good conceived of as common to others does not enter. Even the satisfaction of the animal wants comes in the course of normal moral development to be conceived of as an element in a good which is more than individual. It only remains to be added that on this show- ing the good is not merely personal and social. It is the one precisely so far as it is the other. It is just in so far as a man is able to set aside merely private ends and identify himself with the 1 Bentham was not much troubled with speculative difficulties. He held that all men were by nature selfish, but that fortunately in a few himself among them selfishness took the form of benevolence. J. S. Mill explained that as everybody desired his own happiness, the happiness of everybody was desirable without mentioning to whom. Sidgwick held that the possibility of discord between individual and general happiness pointed to another order of things in which sacri- fices of individuals should be compensated. Beutham may thus be said to have met the difficulty by a psychological, Mill by a logical, and Sidgwick by a theological tour deforce. .] UNITY OF PERSONAL AND SOCIAL GOOD 37 larger purposes of society that his life becomes rounded into the unity in which personality in the full sense of the word consists. On the other hand, social well-being is best served in the lives of individuals who make one or other of the elements in it a centre of personal interest, and possess the power and freedom to develop it in their own way. Personality lives in the material ends with which society supplies it, society lives through the form that free personality impresses on its purposes. To recognise this in practice is the sum and substance of political wisdom. It is the ethical and political counterpart of the religious principle that he that seeketh his life shall lose it, he that loseth it shall find it. Just in so far as the individual commits himself to the principle of co - operation in a social whole does he realise his end as individual personality ; just in so far as society commits itself to the principle of the individuality of the citizens does it realise the unity and stability that constitute it a true " State." The further development of this idea must be left for the next lecture. THE GOOD AS A DIVINE PRINCIPLE. Meantime we have to add the note that is most characteristic of Green's theory of good. The evidence for the reality and the character of the ideal as we have sketched it, consisted for him, as we have seen, not in any mere inward witness or intuition, but in the nature of self-conscious spirit and the actual 38 THE IDEA OF THE GOOD facts of civilisation. It is this ideal operating at first subconsciously, but as reflection develops more and more becoming a conscious motive, that has brought into existence and continually sus- tains all that we value most in the world. But whence does this ideal itself come ? What does it imply as to the real nature and true affinities of the being of whose life it is the guiding principle ? Clearly though it reveals itself in him, it has not been his own creation. The lines on which it can be realised, the laws which control its development, are different indeed from the laws of physical nature, but they have their own definiteness and inviolability. Practical wisdom depends on insight into their character and acceptance of their guid- ance. But to recognise them in practice is one thing, to interpret their full meaning to ourselves is another. It is here that Moral Philosophy finds its deepest problem. To some, indeed, a "metaphysic of ethics" may seem to be of remote interest, having little to do with the everyday traffic of life. This, as we have seen, was not Green's view. He formulates in this connection the great questions of religious philosophy, insisting that it is idle to deny that a man is different according to the answer which he gives to them. " Is there a character which he may and ought to form for himself irrespective alike of what he is inclined to and of what is expected of him ? Is there a God with whom as the imperfect with the perfect, yet as spirit with n.] RELIGIOUS BELIEF AND MORAL PRACTICE 89 spirit he may converse? Is he partaker of an eternal life so that what he is and not merely what he has done is untouched by physical death ? These are perhaps questions which a man may answer affirmatively with little practical result, but which he can scarcely answer in the negative without serious effect, not necessarily on his out- ward course of action, or on the character which he presents to other men, but in the long-run on the inner life, on the character which he would present to one who could see it from within, and which he could scarcely help regarding in spite of his creed as of eternal worth." The philosophical ground of his own answer has been already given in what has been said of his theory of knowledge. In answer to the ques- tion, what does knowledge presuppose, his reply was a single interconnected world which could only be rendered intelligible when conceived of as sustained by the action of a single "self- conditioning and self-determining mind." From the point of view thus reached knowledge itself appeared as the reproduction under the form of time of the mind of a universal and timeless consciousness which therein found itself anew. The same answer mutatis mutandis forces itself on us from the side of the will. As our know- ledge, so our moral life is only ultimately explicable as the reproduction of itself on the part of a divine mind in which all the fullness of perfec- 1 Works, vol. iii. p. 222, 40 THE IDEA OF THE GOOD tion after which man's will fitfully strives, eternally dwells. This argument is not any more than the other an appeal to mere intuition, or anything deducible from an intuition. Still less is it an appeal to a matter of fact that can be established by induction in the ordinary sense, or that is open to observation at all. It rests, as we may say all truth inductive or deductive must ultimately rest, on the insufficiency of anything else to explain the facts. " Given this conception and not without it, we can, at any rate, express that which it cannot be denied demands expression, the nature of man's reason and man's will, of human progress and human shortcoming, of the effort after good and the failure to gain it, of virtue and vice in their connection and in their distinction, in their essential opposition and in their no less essential unity." 1 IDEALISM AND EVOLUTION. (1) This ethical proof of the existence of a divine element in man is open to the same objections as the metaphysical, and may be defended on the same line. We need only repeat the criticisms that seemed to Green to call for particular answer. The argument rests on the demonstrated presence in the mind of an idea or ideal of what is possible, but this, it may be said, forms no ground of inference to anything that actually exists here or elsewhere. The real is the actual ; the ideal is mere possibility an 1 Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 182. .] IMPLICATIONS IN IDEA OF EVOLUTION 41 actual, perhaps, in the making, but to be taken with all the discount that ideality and futurity involve. Green's reply, so far as I know, is the first attempt to turn the flank of the popular naturalism of his own time from the side of its chief strong- hold in the idea of evolution. This idea since its announcement in biological form had been hailed as giving the finishing stroke to the old spiritualistic interpretation of the world. To Green belonged the merit of seeing that out of the strong might come forth sweetness, out of the eater meat. He pointed out that in anything in which real develop- ment is traceable, the present can only be under- stood in the light of the future, the process in the light of the end, the actual of the possible, the real of the ideal ; and that, when this is reflected on, the result must be to reverse our ordinary judgments. For it forces us to see in what we call the possibilities of a thing that which as the guiding and formative principle in it is the ground of its reality, in what we call the actuality a merely passing phase in the development of what it truly is. " To any one who understands a process of development, the result being developed is the reality ; and it is in its ability to become this that the subject undergoing development has its true nature. The actual at any stage of the process is not ; while that which at any stage is we have to call the possibility of that which is not." 1 1 Works, vol. iii. p. 224. F 42 THE IDEA OF THE GOOD Applying this to human life we are justified in holding that the possibilities (the idea of which is the inspiring and formative principle of all moral effort) constitute when properly regarded the true underlying reality of which the finite embodiments that fill our view in time are only transient and imperfect phases. If we fail to recognise this ideal in its operating power, or recognising it to realise its significance, this is largely because of our familiarity with it. The spiritual guides of the race have been those who have been most sensitive to its call, the most ready to recognise in it the witness of a spirit greater than themselves. What is original in Green is the clearness with which he saw that this interpretation carried with it the justification if not of the current formulae yet of the essential faith of religion. "That in virtue of which I am I, and can in consequence so set before myself the realisation of my own possibilities as to be a moral agent" is seen to be identical with "that in virtue of which I am one with God." If it be objected from the side of religion, that this is to make God the source, and in a sense partaker of my sin and selfishness, Green is ready to admit it: "but for the identity of consciousness between man and God, man would not be a sinner." But he adds that "the source of selfishness and sin is also the source of that which overcomes sin." For seeing that "sin is the effort to actualise one's possibilities in that in which they cannot n.] POSITIVISM 43 be actualised," it is only overcome by the " moral discipline which directs the same effort after self- realisation into a truer way of attaining its end." He thus reaches the conclusion that " God is identical with the self of every man in the sense of being the realisation of its determinate possi- bilities, the completion of that which as merely in it is incomplete and therefore unreal ... in being conscious of himself man is conscious of God and thus knows that God is, but knows what He is only so far as he knows what he himself really is." 1 IDEALISM AND POSITIVISM. (2) The second difficulty comes from another side. In discussing the nature of the good we saw that it resolved itself into the development of a form of will and personality which when closely scanned is perceived to involve a society of mutually dependent wills and personalities. We have now seen that this development can only be adequately interpreted when we conceive of it as the unfolding of a uni- versal life, of which the actually existing things of time are merely the passing moments. Are these two results compatible with each other? Does it not rather appear that in proportion as we emphasise the divinity in human ends, we must cease to regard them as finding their centre and reaching fulfilment in anything so limited and passing as individual selves ? 1 Works, vol. iii. p. 226-227. 44 THE IDEA OF THE GOOD While acknowledging the difficulty, and recog- nising in it the reason that has led Positivists and others to seek the centre in some larger idea such as humanity, a national spirit or a perfected form of social organisation, Green uses the opportunity to insist that apart from their embodiment in individual personalities all such substitutes are mere abstractions. As Humanity can nowhere exist apart from the nations that comprise it, so neither can a national spirit exist apart from the individuals who embody it. True, a nation is more than an " aggregate " of individuals. But this does not mean that we can have a national spirit that finds utterance anywhere except in the moral and intellectual achievements of persons. " Our ultimate standard of worth is an ideal of personal worth. All other values are relative to value for, of or in a person. To speak of any progress or improvement or development of a nation or society or mankind except as relative to some greater worth of persons, is to use words without meaning." 1 Similarly from the point of view of history and "progress," progress implies a process in time, but it also implies that the results of the process are gathered together either for that which is the subject of it or for another. The distinguishing mark of human history is that its results are gathered together in self-conscious subjects. And from this, again, it follows that "the spiritual 1 Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 193. n.] THE PHILOSOPHER AS MYSTIC 45 progress of mankind is an unmeaning phrase unless it means a progress of personal character and to personal character a progress of which feeling, thinking and willing subjects are the agents and sustainers, and of which each step is a fuller realisation of the capacities of such subjects. It is simply unintelligible unless understood to be in the direction of more perfect forms of personal life." 1 In these passages Green is wrestling with meta- physical difficulties which must be faced by all who would make their way through thought to a stable theory of human life. In others he gives himself a freer scope and strikes the note of mysticism, which some have felt to be the most attractive feature in his writings. One of these may serve to summarise for us the conclusions of this chapter, and give us the atmosphere he imported into all his practical teaching. "As the poet traversing the world of sense which he spiritualises by the aid of the forms of beauty finds himself ever at home, yet never in the same place, so the philosopher, while he ascends the courts of the intelligible world is conscious of a presence which is always his own, yet always fresh, always lightened with the smile of a divine and eternal youth. Everything is new to him, yet nothing strange. The results of art and science, of religion and law, are all to him 'workings of one mind, features of the same face ' ; yet are the 1 Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 195. 46 THE IDEA OF THE GOOD [LKCT. H. workings and the features infinite? No longer a servant but a son, he rules as over his own house. In it he moves freely and with that confidence which comes of freedom. Such freedom and confidence, indeed, if divorced from the moral life, become a ridiculous conceit. In their proper relation to it as giving fruition beforehand of that of which the moral life is the gradual realisation, they have the weakness, indeed, which belongs to all ideas not actualised, to all forms not filled up; yet are they not like faith without works, dead, but like faith as Christianity knows it a permanent source of unhasting activity." 1 1 Works, vol. iii. p. 90. LECTURE III THE STATE AS WILL AND IDEA The need of a new theory of the relation of the State to the Individual" Will, not Force, the basis of the State " Earlier political philosophy in England Meaning of Green's theory The place of circumstances Great men The general will The rights of individuals Illustra- tion from the right of property. WE have seen in the preceding lectures how Green sought to solve the problem of his time as it presented itself to him, by insisting on a theory of the nature of mind in its characteristic functions of knowing and willing, which, though comparatively new in England, may be said to have been the common property of idealistic thinkers from Plato to Hegel. All knowledge (to repeat it) is seen on ultimate analysis to rest upon the idea of a fundamental unity between subject and object, between the knower and that which there is to be known. This unity in its completed form is not something that can be said to exist as a particular thing. So to take it would be to reduce it to the level of another object. Rather it is the presupposition of all 47 48 THE STATE AS WILL AND IDEA knowledge : the ideal that sustains it, the principle that endows it with life and energy. From this it follows that in knowing the object the mind is not going into exile from itself, but in a true sense is coming to its own ; while, on the other hand the object does not cease to be itself in coming to mind, but is coming for the first time to itself as an ordered world of rationally connected things. Similarly all conscious purpose, in which we have to seek the characteristic of human as dis- tinguished from merely animal action, presupposes an ultimate unity between will and the good which is its object. And this, again, mutatis mutandis means, that in realising itself the will is not destroying the difference between object and subject, but is building up an object which is more than itself; while, on the other hand, in being realised the ideal does not cease to be the very essence of the subject. To all this Green only added, as the result of his own analysis, that the principle that thus at once guarantees the validity of man's aspirations after knowledge and moral good, and fulfils itself in them, can only be adequately conceived as itself a mind and will which is related to his as the universal to the particular, the complete to the partial, the divine to the human. It is in the light of these ideas that we must interpret the particular subject of these lectures. " The dependence of the will of man in its divine m.] NINETEENTH-CENTURY POLITICS 49 service," says Professor MacCunn, 1 "the constant presence in human life of a universal spiritual principle lies at the core of Green's whole ethical and political thought." In the present lecture I propose to take it in its wider aspect his theory of the general nature of the State and Civic Institutions, and of their relation to the rights of individuals and classes. THE NEED OF A NEW THEORY OF THE RELATION OF THE STATE TO THE INDIVIDUAL. In the political problem of his time Green saw only an aspect, though to him the most important and pressing one, of the general problem as already defined. The first decade of the nineteenth century had been a period of almost blinding industrial prosperity. The inventions of the previous century, combined with comparative freedom from legislative restrictions upon employ- ment and the great market which Europe offered for the products of the new industry, had led to unprecedented earnings in all classes. All the darker seemed the results of the general collapse that followed upon the cessation of the Con- tinental war in 1815. The state of things that was then revealed opened men's eyes to the significance for human life of the change that had come over the industrial world. The pheno menal appearance of Robert Owen 2 with the rise of " Socialism " was a sign of the times. 1 Six Radical Reformers. The Political Idealism of Thomas Hill Green. 2 See Podinore's Life of Robert Owen, 1907. 50 THE STATE AS WILL AND IDEA It stood for two things which may be said to have given the keynote of the century's politics : the possibilities of human life under favour- able external conditions, and the power of the community through collective action to assist in creating the required environment. It soon became evident that the particular lines advocated by the Owenites led nowhere in particular, but a movement of organisation had been set on foot under a larger ideal of Political Justice, which seemed to contain the promise of a higher form of social life than had as yet anywhere been achieved. Factory and health Acts, the rise of trade - unionism, education and municipal government were only the organs and outward manifestations of the new constructive spirit act- ing on the principle of corporate responsibility for all that affected the welfare of the individual. What had traditional political theory to say to these movements of constructive reform ? In the political teaching of the great English philosophers, from Thomas Hobbes to Herbert Spencer, it is impossible to trace the same con- tinuity as is discoverable in their theory of know- ledge, and even in their theory of good. There are important differences according as they recog- nise (with Locke) or deny (with Hobbes) the independent existence of social and sympathetic impulses ; and, again, according as they conceive of political society (with the earlier thinkers) as the work of voluntary agreement, or (with the HI.] THE END OF INDIVIDUALISM 51 later) as the result of unconscious growth. But a common note runs through them all. In all of them there is the underlying assumption that the State is a secondary and artificial product a species of excrescence on the life of the individual to whom, and not to the organised community, we have to look if we would understand the rights of man. Necessary as may be the actions and absten- tions on which government insists under present imperfect conditions, they represent in reality encroachments upon natural liberties of which, under more favourable circumstances, the indi- vidual would possess the right to be left in undisturbed enjoyment. This "individualistic" theory had done good work in its time. In the struggle for freedom represented by the English Revolution it had served as a philosophical background for the claims of the reforming party. In the hands of the political economists and utilitarian philosophers of the eighteenth century it assisted the work by which the mediaeval industrial and political systems began to be transformed into something more consonant with modern requirements. More recently still it had proved its vitality by welding together a powerful party committed to "philosophical radicalism," with its programme of free government, free trade, free thought, and free exercise of public speech. But just at the time of which we are now speaking it had begun to show signs of decrepitude, and, instead of 52 THE STATE AS WILL AND IDEA supporting the cause of reform, to be turned against it. This reaction found its most powerful expression in the essays of Herbert Spencer after- wards published as The Man versm the State ; the burden of which was, if not Paine's doctrine that " Society is the outcome of our needs, Government of our wickedness," yet that political organisation existed for definitely limited ends, and that the chief need of the time was to remind reformers that they had outrun their mandate, and to recall them to their true function of resist- ing the usurpations of the State over the natural rights of the individual. There were few, probably, who believed that the great codes of factory, health and education Acts of these years were really signs of a " coming slavery." Most people felt vaguely that they represented rather the dawn of a new idea of social liberty. But there was sufficient obscurity in men's minds as to the conditions of progress, and more particularly as to the bearing of the new doctrine of biological evolution of which Spencer was the accredited interpreter, 1 to justify a certain 1 What Mr L. T. Hobhouse says of the state of things at the beginning of the present century, viz. that there has been no sufficient protest against the doctrine of natural selection as the dominant principle in life, with the consequence that " what has filtered through into the social and political thought of the time has been the belief that the time-honoured doctrine 'Might is Right' has a scientific foundation in the law of biology " (Democracy and Reaction, p. 85), was true a fortiori of Green's time. What difference there is, is largely due to Green's political teaching, which included a deeper interpreta- tion of the evolutionary doctrine than the "evolutionists'* were able to extract from it. See D. G. Ritchie's Principles of State Interference, Darunniam and Politics, and Darwin and Hegel, Preface. m.] KEYNOTE OF NEW POLITICS 53 hesitation among reformers of all parties in accept- ing the guidance of their own deeper intuitions. The national spirit was thus divided against itself, and it appeared to Green, as to many, to be the main problem of philosophy, as important for practice as for theory, to find a basis of reconciliation. WILL, NOT FORCE, THE BASIS OF THE STATE. His solution of it was the application of the ideas with which we are already familiar to explain the true nature of social and political organisation. His chief political work 1 consists of two parts, in the first of which he tracks the individualistic fallacy through the main forms that it has taken in modern philosophy ; in the second he develops his own theory in constructive form. It is with the general results, and more particularly with the formula in which he sums them up, that we are here concerned. We have seen that the essence of human life, and thus the deepest purpose of the will, is to be found in the pursuit of an ideal of its own better- ment, involving the betterment of the society of which each individual is only a part. The mistake of individualism had been that it took as its point of departure a conception of the will and of good 1 Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, Works, vol. ii.