and obligations. To those who knew Professor Green personally, this part of his Works has an additional and very special significance; for here we have the meeting-point between the the speculative and the practical interests, which to onlookers might seem to be two divergent channels in which his life ran, but which in his own mind were united and tended in the same direction. The painstaking pursuit of philosophical truth and the endeavour in all things to be the good citizen and the honest politician were equally characteristic of the man, and sprang from a common source of earnestness and sincerity. His conscience was equally exacting in speculation and in practice. His philosophical thinking was to him no mere exercise of intellectual ingenuity, but proIvided the basis of his conduct and influenced the details of his actions to an extent very rare even amongst those whom we consider the most conscientious of men. He neither despised the small matters of local politics, nor forgot the wider interests of mankind. He went straight from the declaration of the poll, when he was elected a town councillor, to lecture on The Critique of Pure Reason. He was robbed of his sleep by thinking about the Eastern Question, and dreading lest the country should be driven, by motives "of which perhaps a diffused desire for excitement has been the most innocent," into what he regarded as an indefensible and unrighteous war. His strong opinions on the liquor traffic were in his own mind directly connected with his conception of the ethical end and the nature of rights. § 2. THE RELATION BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY The late Mark Pattison 2 thought it must have been due to "a certain puzzle-headedness" on the part of the Professor that he, "a staunch Liberal," should have imported into Oxford “an à priori philosophy, which under various disguises aims at exempting Man from the order of nature, and making him into a unique being whose organism is not to be subject to the uniform laws which govern all other Being that is known to us." It was, in any case, from no want of thinking and puzzling over problems, that Professor Green was at once "a staunch Liberal" and an "à priori philosopher." Mark Pattison's phrase, exempting Man from the order of Nature," must be challenged on behalf alike of Kant and Green, who 1 Cp. Philosophical Works, ii. p. 476. 2 See his Memoirs, pp. 167, 242. by no means deny that Man is a part of Nature, and that human actions are natural events, but who do deny that Man can be understood if he be considered as merely a part of Nature and his actions merely as natural events. But that question must be left for the present. There is a remarkable passage in the Autobiography of J. S. Mill (pp. 273-275), where he says: "The difference between these two schools of philosophy, that of Intuition and that of Experience and Association, is not a mere matter of abstract speculation; it is full of practical consequences, and lies at the foundation of all the greatest differences of practical opinion in an age of progress. The practical reformer has continually to demand that changes be made in things which are supported by powerful and widely spread feelings, or to question the apparent necessity and indefeasibleness of established facts; and it is often an indispensable part of his argument to show, how those powerful feelings had their origin, and how those facts came to seem necessary and indefeasible. There is therefore a natural hostility between him and a philosophy which discourages the explanation of feelings and moral facts by circumstances and association, and prefers to treat them as ultimate elements of human nature; a philosophy which is addicted to holding up favourite doctrines as intuitive truths, and deems intuition to be the voice of Nature and of God, speaking with an authority higher than that of our reason. In particular, I have long felt that the prevailing tendency to regard all the marked distinctions of human character as innate, and in the main indelible, and to ignore the irresistible proofs that by far the greater part of those differences, whether between individuals, races, or sexes, are such as not only might but naturally would be produced by differences in circumstances, is one of the chief hindrances to the rational treatment of great social questions, and one of the greatest stumbling-blocks to human improvement. This tendency has its source in the intuitional metaphysics which characterised the reaction of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth, and it is a tendency so agreeable to human indolence, as well as to conservative interests generally, that unless attacked at the very root, it is sure to be carried to even a greater length than is really justified by the more moderate forms of the intuitional philosophy. That philosophy, not always in its moderate forms, had ruled the thought of Europe for the greater part of a century. My Father's Analysis of the Mind, my own Logic, and Professor Bain's great treatise, had attempted to re-introduce a better mode of philosophising, latterly with quite as much success as could be expected; but I had for some time felt that the mere contrast of the two philosophies was not enough, that there ought to be a hand-to-hand fight between them, that controversial as well as expository writings were needed, and that the time was come when such controversy would be useful." These considerations Mill assigns as his special reason for attacking Sir William Hamilton. Sir William Hamilton was a Whig, it is true (and a Whig in those days was still a Liberal); but undoubtedly the doctrine of "intuitive truths" has served as a convenient formula under which timehonoured delusions and abuses have been sheltered from the attacks of critical analysis and reforming zeal. The "intuitional metaphysics" of this country and the so-called "spiritualist" philosophy, which flourished in France under the restored monarchy, have both been associated with the maintenance of existing ideas and institutions in society, politics, and religion. The supporters of these Intuitionalist systems very often pointed to the triumphs of the Kantian Criticism and sometimes of the post-Kantian Idealism in Germany, glad to use the sanction of great names where they were available, without committing themselves to speculative theories which had the reputation of being vaguely "dangerous.' Those, too, who first introduced the names and theories of the German philosophers were generally enlisted on the side of the reaction against the French Revolution-Coleridge most conspicuously, De Quincey and others following in the same line. In Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey the "Kantian" philosopher, Mr. Flosky, is represented as an extreme obscurantist reactionary; his very name, by an old-fashioned etymology, signifying "the lover of darkness." Certainly Hegel was a Prussian Conservative, and Schelling seemed to lead the way through mysticism back into the fold of the Catholic Church; but people would appear to have forgotten how the aged Kant, with tears in his eyes, |