they are brought by us to its
contemplation. To this special question I can find no answer in Green.
He is indeed aware that there is a difficulty; or rather he admits
that something has been "taken for granted." He has assumed that
there is "some best state of being for man"; that this best state is
eternally present to a divine consciousness; and further, that this
"eternal mind" is reproducing itself as the self of man.[3] On this
supposition only, he says, can our moral activity be explained; and
he holds that the supposition can be justified metaphysically and has
been so justified by himself in the earlier part of his treatise.

[Footnote 1: Prolegomena to Ethics, sec. 172, p. 180.]

[Footnote 2: Prolegomena, sec. 172, p. 180.]

[Footnote 3: Ibid., secs. 173, 174, p. 181.]

Now I am willing to admit that Green showed a correct instinct in
examining the nature of man before entering upon his properly ethical
enquiry. One must know what man is before one can say what his
'good' or his duty is; and it is only because man's nature cannot be
accounted for as a merely natural or animal product that the way is
open for an idealist ethics such as Green's. But perhaps Green laid
too much stress on the problem of historical causation. What matters
it how we came by our knowledge, provided it is the case that we can
know ourselves and the world? If we can now distinguish right and
wrong, can ally ourselves with the good, and follow a moral ideal, of
what great importance are the steps by which the moral consciousness
was attained? And the question here is whether the special results
reached by Green in his metaphysical enquiry into human nature have
brought us any nearer to a solution of the present ethical difficulty.
As we have seen, the metaphysical view which Green arrives at is that
the consciousness which is in man and which raises him above nature
is the manifestation of--the "reproduction" of itself by--an eternal
self-consciousness. Man's own self-consciousness in knowledge and
volition is simply God's self--consciousness "reproduced" (to use
Green's term) in man's animal nature: so that the animal body and
its temporal activities become in some unexplained (and no doubt
inexplicable) way "organic" (to use Green's terminology once more,
where no terminology seems adequate) to a spiritual reality which is
eternal and infinite.

I am far from denying the greatness of this conception or its
practical value. There