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as they present this doctrine as the direct outcome of the Kantian System, the soundness of their philosophical conclusion may fitly be considered here, without unduly anticipating the argument of the following lectures.

Green, then, explicitly identifies the self which the theory of knowledge reveals-the “single active self-conscious principle, by whatever name it may be called," 1 with the universal or divine self-consciousness. He calls it himself most frequently a "spiritual principle." It is "the eternally complete consciousness" which, according to his view, makes the animal organism of man a vehicle for the reproduction of itself. Numberless references to this eternal self might be quoted from the 'Prolegomena to Ethics,' with only verbal variations in statement. It is the punctum stans, to which all order in time is relative. Its constant presence to the relations which constitute the content of the universe communicates to these relations their permanence and objectivity. It is their "medium and sustainer";2 the objectivity of the universe just means its existence for such a consciousness. It will be observed, further,

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1 Prolegomena to Ethics, 40.

2 Ibid., 68.

that Green habitually attributes to this eternal Self a constitutive activity which is tantamount to creation. It is said to "make nature"; nature is said to "result from the activity of the spiritual principle." But if we consider the character of the method by which the result was reached, such predicates will appear more than questionable, for the Self is nothing apart from the world. If it is necessary as the sustainer of relations, it is nothing apart from the relations which it sustains. They exist together, or not at all; they exist, as was said above, as two aspects of the same fact. Accordingly, as Mr Balfour pointed out in a criticism of Green's metaphysics, published in 'Mind' a few years ago, if we speak of activity at all, "we must allow that it is as correct to say that nature makes mind as that mind makes nature; that the World created God as that God created the World."1 This is so far from being a travesty of the Neo-Kantian position that it seems the only possible way of stating it when we aim at perfect frankness and scientific explicitness of expression. And, indeed, in discussing the applicability of the term "cause to describe the relation between

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1 Mind, ix. 80.

God and the world, Green himself warns us that "there is no separate particularity in the agent, on the one side, and the determined world as a whole, on the other, such as characterises any agent or patient, any cause and effect, within the phenomenal world." "That the unifying principle should distinguish itself from the manifold which it unifies is indeed a condition of the unification, but it must not be supposed that the manifold has a nature of its own apart from the unifying principle, or this principle another nature of its own apart from what it does in relation to the manifold world."1 Indeed, "the concrete whole," he says in another place, ❝may be described indifferently as an eternal intelligence realised in the related facts of the world, or as a system of related facts rendered possible by such an intelligence."2 Apart from the metaphysical bearing given to it, this is almost in so many words the result which we reached a little ago by the aid of the transcendental method.

The self or unifying principle has then, according to Green, no nature of its own apart from what it does in relation to the manifold 2 Ibid., 38.

1 Prolegomena to Ethics, 80, 81.

world. But what the unifying principle does in relation to the manifold world is simply to unify it. Green himself tells us in one place that we know the spiritual principle only as "a principle of unity in relation." That, certainly, is all that the transcendental analysis of knowledge tells us about it. The eternal Self which we reach along this path is no more than a focus imaginarius into which the multiplex relations which constitute the intelligible world return. Such a focus or principle of unity enables us to round off our theory with an appearance of personality, but it does not satisfy in any real sense the requirements of Theism. Adapting a phrase used by Hegel in another connection, we may say that this Self is like a constitutional monarch who reigns but does not govern-whose signature is the necessary completion of every document, but is affixed impartially to each as it is laid before him. Such a monarch, says Hegel, may aptly be compared to the dot on the i; he represents the unity of the State, and gives the formal imprimatur of his "I will" to its actions. In like manner, the transcendental Ego, as revealed by the theory of knowledge, represents

1 Prolegomena to Ethics, 72.

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merely the formal unity of the universe as known; and unless we have other data, and approach the question along a different road, we are still far from anything like spirituality or freedom in the ordinary sense of these words. Green's use of the term "spiritual principle is almost inevitably open to misinterpretation, and by its associations leads even himself to make assertions which are not warranted by his own proof-which are indeed inconsistent with it.

In this respect, Kant saw his way more clearly than many of those who make bold to teach him consistency. It was not merely his en

1 Professor Dewey complains (Mind, xv. 60) that the account of the Self given in this paragraph is inconsistent with what was said of it above on pp. 14 and 18. "There the Self was not formal; the form was an abstraction apart from matter. . . Instead

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of being merely logical, the Self was the unified universe. The subject which exists only as the unity of the manifold whose central principle of connection it is,' becomes transformed in ten short pages into a 'focus imaginarius into which the multiple relations which constitute the intelligible world return,'-a 'principle of unity."" But the whole point of my argument is that if we try to use the transcendental Ego as a metaphysical reality, and speak of it as a spiritual principle which makes nature, then we are substantiating it apart from the manifold. And if, as stated on p. 18, it exists only as the unity of the manifold, then it must be true, as stated here, that when so separated it represents merely the formal unity of knowledge.

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