vastness, even though
it went with vagueness, as of some moist wind from far away, reminding
us of our pre-natal sublimity, would be welcome.

Green's great point of attack was the disconnectedness of the reigning
english sensationalism. _Relating_ was the great intellectual activity
for him, and the key to this relating was believed by him to
lodge itself at last in what most of you know as Kant's unity of
apperception, transformed into a living spirit of the world.

Hence a monism of a devout kind. In some way we must be fallen angels,
one with intelligence as such; and a great disdain for empiricism
of the sensationalist sort has always characterized this school of
thought, which, on the whole, has reigned supreme at Oxford and in the
Scottish universities until the present day.

But now there are signs of its giving way to a wave of revised
empiricism. I confess that I should be glad to see this latest wave
prevail; so--the sooner I am frank about it the better--I hope to
have my voice counted in its favor as one of the results of this
lecture-course.

What do the terms empiricism and rationalism mean? Reduced to their
most pregnant difference, _empiricism means the habit of explaining
wholes by parts, and rationalism means the habit of explaining parts
by wholes_. Rationalism thus preserves affinities with monism, since
wholeness goes with union, while empiricism inclines to pluralistic
views. No philosophy can ever be anything but a summary sketch, a
picture of the world in abridgment, a foreshortened bird's-eye view of
the perspective of events. And the first thing to notice is this, that
the only material we have at our disposal for making a picture of the
whole world is supplied by the various portions of that world of
which we have already had experience. We can invent no new forms of
conception, applicable to the whole exclusively, and not suggested
originally by the parts. All philosophers, accordingly, have conceived
of the whole world after the analogy of some particular feature of it
which has particularly captivated their attention. Thus, the theists
take their cue from manufacture, the pantheists from growth. For one
man, the world is like a thought or a grammatical sentence in which a
thought is expressed. For such a philosopher, the whole must logically
be prior to the parts; for letters would never have been invented
without syllables to spell, or syllables without words to utter.

Another man