stable facts. He sees this himself, and endeavours ('Prolegomena,' 46 et seq.) to treat it as an illusion. necessarily incident to our point of view. "There is a point at which the individual's retrospective analysis of the knowledge which he finds himself. to possess necessarily stops. Antecedently to any of the formative intellectual processes which he can trace, it would seem that something must have been given for those processes to begin upon. This something is taken to be feeling pure and simple. When all accretions of form due to the intellectual establishment of relations have been stripped off, there seem to remain the mere sensations, without which the intellectual activity would have had nothing to deal with or operate upon. These then must be in an absolute sense the matter the matter excluding all form - of experience." The statement is warrantable, if at all, he says, only as a statement in regard to the mental history of the individual," and of course it is easy to show that sensation, as a pórn vλn of this sort, is something of which no assertions can be made, inasmuch as it lies outside "the cosmos of possible experience." Mere sensation is in truth a phrase that represents no reality.

Thought is the necessary condition of the existence of sensible facts, and mere sensation, in the sense supposed, is not a possible constituent of the realm of facts" (pp. 48, 49). But this appears, after all, rather to overstate the case; for "this does not mean," Green goes on to say, "that no being can feel which does not also think. We are not called upon here to inquire whether there are really animals which feel but have not the capacity

of thinking. All that the present argument would lead us to maintain would be that, so far as they feel without thinking, their feelings are not facts for them, for their consciousness. Their feelings are

facts; but they are facts only so far as determined by relations, which exist only for a thinking consciousness and otherwise could not exist. And in like manner, that large part of our own sensitive life which goes on without being affected by conceptions, is a series of facts with the determination of which, indeed, thought, as ours or in us, has nothing to do, but which not the less depends for its existence as a series of facts on the action of the same subject which, in another mode of its action, enables us to know them." "Just so far as we feel without thinking, no world of phenomena exists for us. The suspension of thought in us means also the suspension of fact or reality for us. We do not cease to be facts, but facts cease to exist for our consciousness." The feelings exist as facts, it is implied, for the universal consciousness-"the consciousness which constitutes reality and makes the world one." But, according to Green's own showing, the real world present to such a consciousness would consist of the objective conditions of the successive feelings; it would be the totality of the conditions of sensation minus the sensative experience itself. But surely in the case of feeling it is the latter-the existence of the feeling for the feeling consciousness—which is the real fact to be explained. Without absolutely denying this aspect of feeling, Green's explanation seems arbitrarily to rule such experience out of the category of reality or fact, and to identify feeling with its

F

physiological conditions in a way which dangerously resembles the cruder dicta of Materialism. In his posthumous 'Lectures on Logic' he deals with the same question, and suggests that "the notion that an event in the way of sensation is something over and above its conditions," may be "a mistake of ours arising from the fact that we feel before we know what the reality of the feeling is" (Works, ii. 190). "For the only sort of consciousness for which there is reality," he says roundly, "the conceived. conditions are the reality" (191). "For a subject perfectly intelligent, reality would be the fact that a sensation shall occur or has occurred just as much as that it is now occurring, because such a subject would not be a subject of the sensation" (185). To this I can only reply, that such a statement seems to me to wipe out the whole subjective experience of sensitive creatures, and to substitute for this moving world of actual events in time a static or timeless knowledge-picture of the conditions of such events or happenings.

This is borne out by what he says elsewhere of this hypothetical case of a subject perfectly intelligent but not itself the subject of sensation. "Admitting an eternally thinking subject as the correlatum of nature," Green asks in another place, "what is nature for such a subject ?" (Works, ii. 74). "Nature is really," he answers, "or for the eternal thinking subject, for God, what it is for our reason." But "when we come to say what it is for our reason, we cannot get beyond the mere formal conditions of there being a nature at all." "For reason, nature is a system of becoming which rests on unchangeable conditions." In other words, we get the general

conception of orderly change the schematised categories of substance and cause-and no account whatever is given of the content or "matter" of nature. And even so much, it afterwards appears, is possible only for a sensitive consciousness, for such a scheme involves the experience of existence in time. "Sensibility," Green says, "is the condition of existence in time, of there being events related to each other as past, present, and future; and he therefore postulates "an eternal sensibility" as "the eternal condition of time" (Works, ii. 79, 80). This illustrates at least the impossibility of getting to work without feeling, but the interpretation to be put upon it in conformity with Green's general line of statement is hard to fix. And when he elsewhere traces the whole difficulty to "a process of abstraction," and assures us that "feeling and thought are inseparable and mutually dependent, in the consciousness for which the world of experience exists," that "each in its full reality includes the other" ('Prolegomena to Ethics,' 51), one cannot help feeling that this is heroically to cut the knot instead of untying it. It is a seductive but unsatisfactory method of surmounting actual difficulties to refer us for their solution to a possible divine experience which we cannot even conceive. As Hume said, our line is too short to fathom such immense abysses. Green's imbroglio in regard to sensation and time is, at all events, significant as an index of the difficulties which attend the post-Kantian idealism in its attempt to account on its own principles for Kant's "natura materialiter spectata."

84

LECTURE III.

THE RELATION OF HEGEL'S LOGIC TO

EXPERIENCE.

As we should expect, the form of Hegel's system was conditioned by the form which philosophy had taken in the theories of his immediate predecessors. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel stand upon the common basis of the Idealism which they developed out of the Kantian system. But Schelling, as we have seen, in developing Fichte's earlier views, had drifted into a position hardly distinguishable from Spinozism. A philosophy whose Absolute is described as "total indifference" or "pure identity in which nothing is distinguishable," has its face turned the wrong way. Schelling, like Spinoza, cannot avoid speaking as if the developed system of differences which consti